Extinction Crisis

Khan nodded. “I’ll run an X-ray in that area. Metal from garrote wires or knife wounds often transfers to heavy bone. You going to be all right?”

Lyons took a deep breath. Khan, a gorgeous woman in her mid-forties, was no stranger to Lyons. She was one of a team whom Hal Brognola, director of Stony Man Farm, kept on hand to deal with the aftereffects of a domestic operation undertaken by Able Team, Phoenix Force or even the Executioner. The Justice crew kept traces of Stony Man’s covert operations well out of the public eye, but kept data on hand in case there was a prosecutable case left in the wreckage of Stony Man’s cleansing flames.

For a woman who interacted with the dead, her empathy was outstanding. She could endure even the worst of Lyons’s legendary rages, never steering away from providing him with a bridge back to humanity. Lyons managed a smile for her. “Thanks, Alicia, I can deal with the grief.”

Khan nodded. “Catharsis is one thing, baby. Just don’t hang on to the pain for too long.”

Lyons nodded. “Then get to testing, Alicia. I have murderers to track down.”

Khan stroked his cheek, a brief touch of tenderness from tigress to lion. They were both hunters, different predators in the same ecosystem, tracking criminals. While the medical examiner took to her chase with microscopes and spectrometers, Lyons’s tools of the hunt were measured in twelve gauge and .357.

“Good hunting,” she told him and returned to escorting Hirtenberg’s body to the coroner’s wagon.

The Able Team leader glanced one last time at the receding gurney, then left the hallway to meet up with his partners, Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz and Rosario “Politician” Blancanales, also fondly referred to as Pol. Able Team had gone from investigation and paper-pushing mode to full-on pursuit.

T HE DOOR PANEL on the side of the van rolled open and Hermann Schwarz felt the mass of Lyons’s muscular form tilt the vehicle. He opened his eyes after receiving a slap on the shoulder from his best friend, Rosario Blancanales.

“Look busy, the boss is here,” Blancanales said.

“Carl knows that I’m a slacker,” Schwarz replied.

“A slacker who calculates quantum physics equations the same way most people do Sudoko,” Lyons mentioned. “Actually, no. You don’t even need pen or paper. Do you need a description of the murder-bot one more time, Gadgets, or have you already cobbled one together out of soda cans and twist ties?”

Schwarz looked over his shoulder and looked back at his commander, attempting to imitate Lyons’s moments of annoyance. “Oh, fecal discharge, Rosario, my good man. The honorable Mr. Lyons just paid me a compliment and we haven’t even blown anyone up yet.”

“Gadgets, I’m being sweetness and love right now because I am under the delusion that you will put my hands around the throat of the scumbag who took out a fellow cop,” Lyons explained. “Do you want me to return that anger back toward you and your snarky attitude?”

Schwarz pivoted in his seat and handed over a clipboard. “No. I did not build my own copy of the robot. Seems we were out of guitar picks necessary for the stegasaur-style ridge plates. But I do have technical drawings that hypothetically reconstruct the device based on your description of its movements and external dimensions.”

Lyons rewarded Schwarz with a tight-lipped smile as he accepted the stack of papers with twenty pages of sketches of motors and circuits. He leafed through until he came to a page depicting himself, clad in a bearskin, wielding a massive thigh bone, ready to smash the robot that had escaped him. Scrawled in a cartoon word balloon were the words, “Carl smash shiny worm!”

“Can I keep this for my fridge?” Lyons asked Schwarz.

The Able Team electronics whiz raised an eyebrow. “Sure.”

Lyons carefully ripped out the page, removed the sketch of the robot, then crumpled the rest of the page and hurled it out the sliding panel door, where it landed in the gutter. Lyons stuck it under the front clip as an impromptu cover for the robot design notes. “Do you know who built it?”

Schwarz looked out the door of the van, even though the wadded sketch was long gone. “Attempting to narrow down the original designer of a robot is next to impossible. There are entire schools of kids who build these things, not to mention countless amateurs who enter them into battle-bot competitions.”

Lyons nodded. “I’m growing disappointed.”

“Ah, but Mr. Lyons, you asked for a designer, while I applied my mental powers to a more productive course of action. I thought outside of the box,” Schwarz said. “There is room in the robot for a 5.8-gigahertz transmitter that can maintain a remote link.”

Lyons smirked. “You’ve been monitoring that signal?”

Schwarz rolled his eyes. “But of course. Unfortunately, I’ve only narrowed down the broadcast to a nearby relay module.”

Lyons looked through the windshield as Schwarz turned wordlessly in his swivel seat. Halfway down the block sat a brown delivery van with a popular company’s yellow logo painted on the back door. Lyons looked at the license plates. “They forgot to forge plates with the proper business coding on them. That vehicle’s only got stickers for nonperishable food delivery, not air freight.”

Blancanales shook his head. “You with the electronics, and him with the memorizing every possible type of license plate. Are you two attempting to make me feel like a fifth wheel here?”

Lyons winked. “Nothing could match your seven hundred years of experience, Methuselah.”

“We hadn’t run the plates yet,” Blancanales said, steering the conversation away from the fact that he was the oldest man in the van and on the team. “We simply tracked down the signal and I realized that there was no one on this street that had received a delivery, and no one had left that truck.”

Lyons looked along the sidewalks. “I might just make detectives out of you two jungle fighters yet.”

Schwarz sighed. “Detectives. That’s why God and Al Gore invented the Internets, Ironman. To make actual gumshoe work obsolete.”

Blancanales regarded Lyons. “Not going to tear the doors off of their van?”

“I want to see if they make a pickup instead of a delivery,” Lyons replied. “Gadgets, you have a camera focused on the undercarriage of that truck, right?”

Schwarz looked back at Lyons, sincerely offended this time by the implication that he wouldn’t have done what his leader had suggested. “You trust me to plant a bomb in a microcomputer in the space of fifteen seconds before thieves can run off with it, but when I’m sitting right behind a suspicious enemy vehicle, you doubt that I’ve already been recording it for the time it took for the CSI team to run all their fingerprints and blood-spray patterns?”

Schwarz flicked on a monitor attached to the dashboard before Lyons could answer. A high-quality view of the underside of the van was visible. “The monitor would have turned on because I have a sensor in the camera set up to activate at the first motion.”

Lyons patted Schwarz on the shoulder. “You just earned the weekends of the Consumer Electronics Show and the Electronic Entertainment Expo free. Barring end-of-the world crises.”

“Yay,” Schwarz droned, trying to seem unexcited, but Lyons knew exactly the kind of electronic geekery that went on for those two weekends. The monitor flickered, indicating a change in the ground-level camera view. “Okay, something just moved a storm grating in the shadow of the curb.”

Lyons squinted at the ten-inch monitor. “Come on, you son of a bitch, show yourself.”

The metal grille tottered, then flopped over. A bulbous, silvery head emerged from under the sidewalk. As Schwarz muttered about a downgrade of hydraulic efficiency from Lyons’s gunshot, movement on the sidewalk drew the Able Team leader’s attention. A man was pushing a stroller down the street.

“It should have been able to push the grating over a little more easily,” Schwarz commented.

“I’d hit it with my .357 Smith,” Lyons said distractedly, watching the man and the toddler walk closer to the delivery van.

That brought a grin to Schwarz’s face. “Able Team. Travel the world. Meet technological wonders. Shoot them to pieces.”

“’Kin A,” Lyons agreed softly.

The robotic inchworm crawled toward the center of the truck’s undercarriage. A panel opened above it, and two hands reached down to grasp it.

“We’ve got the bas—” Lyons began.

“It’s a segment too long,” Schwarz cut him off.

Lyons’s attention flitted from the monitor to the father and child on the street. He exploded out of his seat, jumping to the sidewalk and charging toward the delivery truck. He didn’t need an explanation about the nature of Schwarz’s grim, sudden warning. He took off from the Able Team van as if launched from the barrel of a gun as fast as his powerful leg muscles could propel him.

“Carl! Wait!” he heard Blancanales call out.

It was too late to stop Lyons as he drew upon his high school and college football conditioning to rocket him down the sidewalk with explosive speed. Each thrust of his powerful leg muscles carried him closer to the delivery van and the two bystanders who were now even with the stopped vehicle. The young father looked up from his child in the stroller, seeing the human freight train barrelling toward them both. Lyons unfurled his massive arms and scooped up father and infant. The Able Team commander twisted himself so that his broad back would absorb the shock wave that he expected to erupt. It came an instant later, the brown metal skin billowing out. Thankfully the hull of the truck was not pre-scored metal so that when it split due to the rupturing overpressure of the exploding robot, no shrapnel flew from the delivery van, though Lyons had his Kevlar on under his shirt and jacket. Lyons’s forward momentum had carried all three of them past the torn vent in the side of the truck, sparing the trio exposure to a gout of flame that vomited through the wound in the vehicle.

Outside, in open air, the pressure wave had space to roll and disperse, sparing the Able Team leader and the two bystanders. The men inside of the truck would have had no such dispersal as the atmosphere inside of the vehicle could only compress so much before it crushed the bodies it was trapped with. Any living leads had been pulverized by the self-destruct mechanism in the robot.

“Y-you saved us,” the man stammered.

Lyons set down the stroller, unhooking the crying toddler within. He handed the girl off to dad after a quick examination for shrapnel injuries or possible burns. The father had suffered a scraped elbow, but the baby had been shielded from sidewalk rash by Lyons’s body and her crumpled stroller. “Just calm your little girl down and go home.”

“What…is this, a terrorist attack?” the man inquired.

“No. It’s just a couple of crooks being silenced by their boss,” Lyons explained. “You didn’t see anything, but don’t stick around, all right? Just make sure the kid’s fine.”

The girl’s wails subsided as her father cradled her. “Thank you.”

Lyons nodded and waved him off.

Schwarz and Blancanales had run up to the gutted van, but the heat of the fire inside kept them at bay. Lyons jogged back around toward his partners, phone already in hand.

“Barb, we have an explosion four blocks north of the Department of Energy offices. Get on the press and the Justice Department and start spinning that it’s organized crime related, and totally independent of the murder of Mare. Keep this from being released as a terrorist attack,” Lyons said to Stony Man.

“You found the robot?” Price asked.

“Yes, and it had a self-destruct mechanism inside,” Lyons told her. “We won’t get anything from the punks who delivered it.”

“I’ll put word forward to Calvin and Rafael,” Price replied. “They’re following another van with a mystery load in the vicinity of Inshas.”

“Relay to them that the robot I encuntered had built-in Tasers and a wire whip that cuts through aluminum and flesh like butter,” Lyons added.

“Given the Israeli situation at Negev, the robot they might encounter could have a firearm built in, as well,” Price said. “You lucked out.”

“Didn’t seem so lucky for Hirtenberg,” Lyons growled. “Send Alicia to pick up our crispy critters here. And give her my apologies for two call-outs in one day.”

“You sound like you’re not coming back to the Farm,” Price mused.

“No. I know the van builders who might have crafted the fake delivery truck,” Lyons said.

“We haven’t even run the plates off of Gadgets’s video footage,” Price replied.

“I know the D.C. area chop shops and kinky garages like the back of my hand, Barb,” Lyons countered. “We beat cops don’t like waiting for slow shit like Web searches.”

Price laughed. “All right. Khan’s team is on the way to the blast site. D.C. Metropolitan Police has been advised to control the area and allow you egress from the crime scene.”

Lyons looked up at the police helicopter that was already watching the area. “Good. Just to be safe, tell Alicia we may have a third corpse pickup for her.”

“I’ll convey your apologies,” Price said. “Flowers and candy, too?”

“And reservations for dinner,” Lyons added. He turned to Schwarz and Blancanales. “Mount up, soldiers. It’s time to kill people and break things.”

“Enough investigation?” Blancanales asked.

Lyons nodded. “Now it’s time for prosecution.”

Schwarz grinned. “Prosecution to the max, baby.”

Able Team drove off, ready for war in the streets.

C ALVIN J AMES, RIDING IN the backseat of the Peugeot station wagon with “Atalanta” Kristopoulos, answered his satellite phone’s chirp on the first ring.

“Farrow here,” James said, using his cover name.

“We have news from across the pond.” Barbara Price opened the conversation. “Ironman and his boys encountered some delivery men just like yours. Their special present was a two-fold surprise.”

“Whatever it is, it had a self-destruct mechanism,” James deduced. That brought sharp stares from the others in the station wagon.

“All right. Only one surprise,” Price corrected herself.

“It was a robot?” James inquired.

“Here’s the surprise. It’s been rigged with antipersonnel defenses, and was utilized for the assassination of an investigator that Ironman was liaising with,” Price explained. “It gave Ironman a pounding with Tasers, a wire saw and its tail boom.”

“Tail?” James asked.

“It’s a worm- or snake-shaped robot, which probably allows for greater flexibility through vents and drainage pipes,” Price said.

“Okay. That makes sense. I was imagining one of those modified radio-controlled cars or a rebuilt lawn mower device like the battle bots that show up on British television,” James said. “So the delivery men don’t control the robots themselves?”

“No, but they do sit on a remote signal relay,” Price told him. “Gadgets and Bear agree that the command frequency is beamed through a tight focus point, which allows the signal to penetrate concrete and steel over short distances.”

“The usual structures of a nuclear power plant would interfere with the robot’s reception,” James agreed, following Price’s logic.

“Precisely,” she said. “A narrow-band, high-energy transmission allows for real time control in a power-plant campus or even your average office building.”

“And these things are rigged for fighting?” James continued.

“Ironman was tased, and when the saw got snarled on a wastebasket he used for a shield, it nearly shattered his arm with its shield,” Price recounted. “But that was the extent of its offensive weaponry.”

“So it’s agile and tough to escape our favorite caveman,” James said.

“Carl put a .357 SIG round into it and was only able to take out the robot’s Taser battery,” Price described. “I’d hate to see what would happen if the Taser were replaced with a Glock.”

“Chances are, that’s what we’ll have to deal with,” James muttered. “Thanks for the heads-up on the destruct mechanism, as well.”

“It’s enough to kill everyone inside of a Grumman Kurbmaster,” Price added. “But Carl was only fifteen feet from the van when it exploded, and came through unharmed. That’s not to say the destruct mechanism can’t produce its own shrapnel.”

“Add in constant monitoring, presumably through built-in cameras,” James said.

“Just built-in cameras?” Encizo asked from the Peugeot’s shotgun seat. “Ask mother hen if she happens to have an eye in the sky over our position.”

“Just satellites.” James relayed her answer. “And they don’t see anything in the air.”

Farkas spoke up. “That’s the point of remote observation drones. If they showed up on radar and aerial cameras.”

“Figures,” Kristopoulos grumbled. “Robots belly-crawling on the ground and flying in the air over our heads.”

“It’s only observing us so far,” Encizo said. “But if they warn the Brotherhood members in the van or if it has weapons of its own, we’re screwed.”

“We are hanging back far enough that the drone operator may not think we’re following their people,” Farkas offered.

“If they are paranoid enough to put a set of eyes in the air, then they’re too smart to leave our continued trailing of their deliverymen to chance,” Encizo countered. “We were made long before I ever noticed their bird.”

“Well, that’s the end of a perfectly good surveillance operation,” Kristopoulos said. “What would be their response?”

“Anything from scorched earth to the Brotherhood engaging in evasive maneuvers,” James said. “But the deliverymen don’t seem to have deviated from their normal course.”

“Maybe they want us to know,” Farkas said. “After all, how do you defend against armed, murderous robots?”

Encizo brought his field glasses to bear on the back of the Muslim Brotherhood van. “The back door just moved.”

The Cuban drew his Glock 34 from its spot in a cross-draw holster under his photographer’s vest. He heard Kristopoulos and James do likewise in the backseat.

“We might not know how to prevent robots from infiltrating a nuclear power plant, but a pissed-off terrorist with an assault rifle is practically a Friday-night get-together for us,” James said.

A hundred yards ahead, the muzzle-flash of an AK-47 burned. Even as the windshield cracked and deformed under the first impact, Farkas swerved hard to avoid the rain of shattered glass and steel-cored bullets tearing into their vehicle.

CHAPTER THREE

Rafael Encizo crouched tightly in the passenger’s seat of the Peugeot as Farkas swerved. Bullets cut through the windshield and metal frame holding up the roof of the automobile before slicing the air over his head. Centifugal force and the anxiety of 7.62 mm rounds snapping past so close that his black hair flew with their passage made him grip the Glock 34 Tactical pistol tightly in his fist. Only his index finger resting on the dust cover kept the point-and-pull weapon from discharging from muscle tension. The idea of a handgun versus a Kalashnikov didn’t appeal to the Cuban Phoenix Force veteran, even though the G-34’s five-plus-inch barrel milked every ounce of range, power and accuracy out of the 9 mm round it fired. The polymer pistol still lacked the punch and reach of a .30-caliber rifle.

“Damn!” he heard Calvin James bellow from the backseat.

“Are you hit?” Encizo called back.

“Got cut by flying glass!” James snarled. “Farkas, pull over. We’ll get our big guns from the trunk.”

“No can do!” Farkas returned. “The Brotherhood is coming back around!”

The station wagon squealed its tires as Farkas spun the vehicle away from the enemy van. Its roof and all of its windows were blasted into a sieve of shattered glass and perforated metal. The hostile truck went into full reverse, backing toward them. The Peugeot ground to a halt, and Encizo realized that he was facing the stern of the Brotherhood’s van head-on. If this was an old naval battle, Encizo would have been in position for an unopposed salvo on the vehicle, but in a modern assault-rifle battle where he’d only brought a side arm, he was a sitting duck, even behind the door of the station wagon. The gunman in the back poured on more fire. Encizo winced as a round, slowed by the car door, plunked into the Kevlar he wore. The body armor barely protected his stomach from the awesome punch of the Kalashnikov bullet. In response, Encizo thrust the Glock out of the passenger’s window and blazed away. A half-dozen rounds jetted out of the extra-length barrel and speared through the night at the enemy gunner, each shot going off as fast as Encizo could pull the trigger.

From the back, James and Kristopoulos added their firepower to the fusillade of 9 mm clatter against the Muslim Brotherhood vehicle. The handgun rounds just didn’t have the same oomph. Rather than punch through the door that the enemy gunman was using for cover, they merely dented the metal, and they weren’t even able to smash the window through which they could see the silhouette of his head. The rounds only smacked starred impact craters in the glass. Sure, the fifty-yard distance lessened the penetrative punch of their bullets, but as the Brotherhood van drew closer, a second rifleman poked his weapon out of the passenger’s window.

“Hit the gas!” the Cuban shouted. The Peugeot station wagon shot forward, avoiding the twin streams of full automatic thunder. The rifles clattered as their owners swung the muzzles of their weapons in an effort to keep up with Phoenix Force and company.

Encizo levelled his Glock now that he had an angle on the open, passenger’s-side window of the enemy vehicle. He ripped off four fast shots, and while he couldn’t hit the head or the torso of the Egyptian gunman inside, he was able to break the killer’s arm with three lucky hits. His last bullet clanged off of the AKM’s receiver. Forearm bones splintered and muscles chopped into a bloody mess of shredded mead and the Egyptian terrorist let his weapon clatter into the dirt road.

The Brotherhood van swerved hard as the Peugeot swung for a brief moment, parallel to the enemy vehicle. Phoenix Force and their allies were the only ones able to open up, this time taking full advantage of the broadside they had been presented. At the space of ten feet, the Glocks had more than enough punch to tear through the van’s thin metal skin. James, Encizo and Kristopoulos unleashed a torrent of rapid-fire handgun rounds into the hostile van, the Peugeot’s interior filling with smoke and thunder. Though no handgun could be fired with the speed of a submachine gun or assault rifle, the three warriors were more than able to pour on a storm of copper-jacketed lead that slashed across the van’s passenger side. The wounded rifleman’s head snapped violently as it caught a 9 mm slug cored through his temple. The enemy vehicle jerked violently as blood and brain matter flew into the driver’s eyes, shocking and blinding him.

“That got him,” James growled as the Egyptian radicals ground noisily against a roadside barrier in a spray of sparks from metal-on-stone violence.

The rear of the van vomited a tongue of flame and the roar of an AK-47 that blew the rear window out of their station wagon.

Kristopoulos glared at James. “They didn’t stay screwed.”

“Less bitching, more shooting!” Encizo snapped at the bickering pair in the back.

“I concur!” Farkas agreed as he cranked the steering wheel, pulling the group out of the line of fire of the enemy assault rifle. “Kill him!”

Once again, Encizo, James and Kristopoulos opened up with their side arms, but Farkas, in his instinctive effort to avoid the withering bite of the enemy gunman’s full-auto assault rifle, had pulled their station wagon out of direct view of their target. Their 9 mm bullets clanged against the side of the Brotherhood van, but there was no way to tell if they had struck the gunman in the van’s cargo compartment.

“We don’t have a shot, Farkas,” the Cuban complained.