Splintered Sky

He summoned up a satellite map on his PDA and began calculating distances from the previous night’s battle and the road to the coast.

“Foothills?” Lyons asked.

“Yup. Found it. Seriously broken ground where you could stash a used car lot and keep it invisible from the air,” Schwarz answered. “I’m going to check on the thrusters, but I think I’ll talk to Dr. Bertonni. Something tells me that she’s not out of danger yet.”

Blancanales thought for a moment. “Give me a few minutes on the phone, then I’ll hop out with you and Jack to the airfield to check it out.”

“Good plan,” Lyons replied. “The less dicking around we do here, the less chance we have of losing our wayward punk.”

“Good hunting,” Schwarz told his partners.

“Thanks,” Lyons answered. “This guy looks like he’s dangerous game.”

S ABRINA B ERTONNI DIDN’T feel any more comfortable after having her side stitched shut, but she was alive, and no longer bleeding.

She was tired, having been up for a long time, but the investigative team looking into the Burgundy Lake raid had brought her to the warehouse where recovered hardware and wreckage from the battle scene were assembled on long tables to be examined in depth for forensic traces. After a grueling inventory, the exhausted rocket scientist took a seat on a bench in a corner. A deceptively baby-faced, mustached man with a mop of unkempt brown hair and sparkling brown eyes held a bottle of cold cola out to her.

Bertonni took the bottle with a smile and he sat next to her, opening his own drink. “Thanks.”

He wore a badge naming him as Henry Miller. Sabrina raised an eyebrow as he took a seat beside her without drilling her with questions.

“You look like you could use the caffeine,” Gadgets Schwarz told her.

“Thanks, Deputy Miller,” Sabrina replied.

“Call me Gadgets,” Schwarz replied. “Deputy makes me sound like I belong in a Western.”

“Gadgets,” Bertonni repeated. “So you’re a tech-head?”

“Ever since I was a kid,” Schwarz replied, taking a sip. “I’m mostly electronics, programming and robotics, but I’ve dabbled in rocket science.”

Bertonni nodded, drawing a sip from her soda. “So what department are you with?”

“The Justice Department,” Schwarz answered. “But I’m more a tech-head than a field agent, despite the gun on my hip.”

“So I don’t have to dumb down answers to any questions you have?” the woman asked.

Schwarz shook his head. “Nope. Though I already know about the basics of your compact hydrogen cell.”

“How much do you understand?” Bertonni prodded.

“Enough to be impressed at your fuel to energy conversion formulas,” Schwarz responded. “I’m more solid-state technology, but I’ve got a solid grounding in chemistry and physics. The important thing we need to know is, how recoverable are the engine parts?”

“The thrusters were made to withstand considerable shake, rattle and roll. These were going to be tested out on the next ISS mission. We had everything set up to transport today,” Bertonni said. The words caught in her throat. “It’s so hard to believe that only a few hours ago…”

Schwarz rested his hand on her shoulder. Bertonni gulped, trying to dislodge the constriction in her windpipe, but her voice still crackled with tension.

“A plane was supposed to be coming in to pick up the test modules at Burgundy Lake this morning,” she explained. “Burgundy Lake…Stupid name for the test facility. There wasn’t anything for forty miles that was inhabitable, let alone moisture. Flat desert with just that compound, and the outskirts of Yuma safely shielded behind a mountain and…”

Schwarz gave her a gentle squeeze as she began to ramble. Bertonni wiped a tear and smiled gently at him. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Schwarz said. “It’s going to be all right.”

He frowned, then pulled his CPDA. An aerial view of the compound betrayed a landing strip not a mile away. “You didn’t happen to see what went down at the airstrip?”

“No, but explosive charges were placed around the dormitories for the staff, as well as the testing and administrative buildings. All we knew was that the trucks rolled up, and then my partners started…started…”

Schwarz gave her shoulder a reassuring pat. She rested her hand on his, smiling at the gesture. “You need to get some sleep. I’ve got a pair of well-armed federal Marshals who will keep you safe.”

“Could have used them six hours ago,” Bertonni said with a sob. “You’re going to make sure whoever did this won’t get away with my friends’ murders, won’t you?”

“Someone already took care of most of them,” Schwarz informed her. “The killers are smeared across a five-mile stretch of desert along the border. They’ve been shoveling bodies into bags for identification.”

Bertonni nodded. “I thought I’d have felt better, knowing that the men who did this are dead…”

“It doesn’t take the pain away. It rarely ever does. But later on, you’ll know that the monsters behind this won’t hurt anyone else again,” Schwarz replied.

“And the guys who put them up to it?”

“They’re going down. I’ll see to it.”

Sonora, Mexico

S PEEDING OVER THE S ONORA desert in a Bell JetRanger, Carl Lyons heard his cell phone warble.

“What’s up, Gadgets?” the Able Team leader asked.

“Lot of shit’s not adding up, Ironman,” Schwarz responded. “There’s an airfield right by the test facility, call it a mile away, but with an access road. And a NASA transport was scheduled to pick up the test modules that the marauders stole. They could have hit the airstrip this morning and taken the transport if they’d only waited a few hours.”

Lyons frowned. “They have the pilots, especially if they intended to use any airstrips in Sonora. And the NASA crew wouldn’t notice bullet holes in the test facility. The raiders could have hit the plane, then taken it through one of the regular dope smuggling flight routes, and refuel it for a dash to a port or to an island refueling station.”

“Carl, Gadgets,” Blancanales interjected. “I just got off station with the Farm. The Justice Department forensics team going over our leftovers have reported in. It’s an international crew. It’s a mix between Europeans, Orientals and Semetic operatives.”

“Hired mercenaries, or perhaps a sanitized strike group assembled by a major power,” Lyons muttered. Outside his window, the sands of Mexico rocketed past at well over 100 miles an hour. “How soon till we reach the first of the airfields I looked at, Jack?”

“About ten minutes,” Grimaldi answered.

The terrain rippled, and Lyons was heartened by the fact that it would be difficult to even use a dune buggy or a motorcycle to cross it. The wrinkled furrows would make any rapid progress a stomach-churning, neck-snapping journey. The unmarked tops of windswept dunes showed no tire tracks, and both Lyons and Blancanales used their binoculars to scan for tracks or dust clouds of any sort. Frustration gnawed at Lyons’s gut as he hunted for clues. Then he spotted a glimmer against the pale blue sky in the distance.

Jack Grimaldi had seen it, as well. “An Ultralight.”

“Pushing the limits of its range,” Blancanales noted. While he didn’t have a PDA to calculate distance, the wily veteran was as good with a map and compass as any highly trained soldier. “He probably resorted to gliding to conserve fuel, which is how we caught up with him this far.”

“If it’s him,” Lyons countered. “Jack, get us closer. We can resume the search pattern if it’s a false alarm.”

“Got it,” Grimaldi replied.

“We’re closing in on the first airstrip,” Blancanales stated. On his map was a marker of a position that had been provided by Lyons’s contacts within the U.S. Border Patrol. “And he’s circling for a descent.”

“Doesn’t mean anything,” Lyons replied. Still, he reached for the DSA-58 carbine he had stashed under his seat. He kept its stock folded, for better maneuverability inside the confines of the helicopter. He idly wished for the nose sensors on the Hughes 500 NOTAR they’d utilized only a few hours before, but the JetRanger had the kind of speed and range Grimaldi required to ferry them on their search of the desert. The airstrip was quiet and still, but camouflage netting could have concealed a small battalion from unaided eyes. FLIR and Terrain Radar would have given them a better heads-up. He clicked on his open line to the Farm.

“Bear, got anything on satellite?”

“The sun’s been baking the area enough to make any thermal imaging a mess. Radar shows you following something, but its signature is faint and indecipherable,” Kurtzman answered. “It’s an ultralight?”

“Yeah,” Lyons confirmed. “It could be made of any one of a dozen materials that wouldn’t show up well on a radar scan. Even its engine would be masked by the superstructure. Are there any vehicles in the area?”

“Anything outside is probably covered,” Kurtzman told him. “The signal isn’t coming back clean, so it’s possible that someone’s got camouflage netting with radar-absorbent material in it. Expect trouble, but I don’t have any magic figures for you.”

“I’ve got the outline of a hangar,” Blancanales called out. “It looks large enough for half a dozen Cessnas. It’s covered in camouflage netting, and low profile to blend into the hills.”

Lyons squinted. There was motion near the airstrip as the Ultralight suddenly banked hard, powering into a climb to push above the altitude of the JetRanger. Grimaldi was watching their aerial quarry, but the movement on the ground was fluid motion of fabric tossed aside.

“Ironman, we’ve got signatures!” Kurtzman shouted. “Looks like…”

“Machine guns,” Lyons bellowed, jolting Grimaldi into a hard juke to one side. Spearing tracers burned through the air only inches from Lyons’s window, twin streams of glowing streaks confirming the dual-mounted .50-caliber machine guns raking the sky. Another position fluttered to life farther down the strip, and Blancanales shoved his folded FAL’s barrel through the window port, holding down the trigger for half of the 30-round extended magazine.

With Grimaldi engaging in evasive action, the Puerto Rican’s fire only swept the machine-gun nest with a few glancing shots, but it was enough to force the antiaircraft position to miss the JetRanger. Still, Blancanales was satisfied with the results of his suppression fire.

Lyons had his DSA-58 burping out rounds to harass the other antiaircraft nest, but he knew that there wasn’t much of a chance of scoring an easy hit, not with Grimaldi weaving through the sky. “Jack, we need to get out of here. At least set us down out of range of the twin mounts.”

“Make me a hole, guys,” Grimaldi said.

Blancanales thumbed a round into the breech of his grenade launcher and fired. The shell hit, spewing a noxious-looking green cloud that obscured one of the machine-gun nests. In the meantime, Lyons unslung his Mossberg Cruiser 500, ejecting its load of Brenneke shells and quickly thumbing in a load of ferret rounds. The 12-gauge shell spit a tear-gas bomb toward the other twin-mounted Fifty. Being a solid round, the shotgun tear-gas shell had the range to pepper the enemy gunnery position. By tromboning the slide as fast as he pulled the trigger, Lyons saturated the nest with a blinding, stinging caldron of capsicum gas. The machine gunner, his sinuses and respiratory passages swollen in reaction to the horrendously hot-pepper extract, held down the spade trigger on the heavy machine gun, firing uncontrollably. His tear ducts felt as if they were filled with scalding hot acid, and he swept the half of the sky that was empty.

Blancanales’s smoker was followed by a second, thickening the turgid green cloud, giving the helicopter room to maneuver.

“Put us down,” Lyons told Grimaldi. “If we back off, they won’t stick around.”

“Roger,” Grimaldi answered. “Luckily, Pol laid down a good landing marker.”

Lyons looked to see that the ace Stony Man pilot had swooped the helicopter over Blancanales’s thick green fog. The rotor wash pushed away the cloud, and Grimaldi let the aircraft drop right on top of the second machine-gun nest. The starboard landing skid hit the frame of the twin mount and tore it from its moorings, digging it into the sand.

Lyons and Blancanales snapped out of their harnesses and were out the chopper’s doors in an instant. The Able Team leader paused only long enough to ram the pistol grip of his Mossberg into the jaw of one of the antiaircraft crew they’d landed among. Bone shattered under the impact, the gunner’s head flopping loosely on a rubbery neck. Blancanales’s FAL carbine burped out a short burst, churning 7.62 mm slugs through the intestines of a second gun crewman.

Lyons didn’t have to tell Grimaldi to take off, as the helicopter popped into the sky like a cork. Already the tear gas was wearing off on the first machine gun nest. “Pol!”

Blancanales whirled, feeding his M-203 again. Snapping the shoulder stock straight on his rifle, he triggered the grenade launcher. A 40-mm round spiraled through the air between the two antiaircraft positions, the shell’s travels seeming to take forever as Grimaldi struggled to gain altitude. When it felt like the first crew of enemy gunners could have recovered and taken a nap to sleep off the effects of the tear gas, the grenade landed at their feet. Six-point-five ounces of high explosive converted from solid potential chemical energy into a thunderclap of pressure and heat. The twin-mounted machine gun was shorn into its component parts by a wave of force that turned its crew’s legs and lower torsos into a rocketing halo of jellied meat. Their top halves were simply lobbed out of the sandbag ring, bouncing on the tarmac.

Lyons traded his Mossberg for the DSA carbine to deal with a group of newcomers to the battle, teams of men exploding through two doors of the hangar, brandishing automatic weapons. Lyons’s full-auto fire lanced into the squad, stitching torsos with high-velocity bullets that exploded through bone and vaporized tunnels through muscle and organ tissue.

“Damn it! Get them!” a voice shouted. Lyons narrowed his eyes and spotted a short, balding man with lean, cruel features, tripping a memory in the Able Team commander’s mental mug book. He dismissed his familiarity with the enemy leader, swinging his DSA’s chattering stream of automatic fire toward his slender opponent. The enemy leader charged ahead of the scything arc of supersonic lead, saving his own life, but causing Lyons to mow down three of his forces.

Blancanales added his autofire to the conflagration, but the fleeing leader was inside the protective walls of the hangar. Rather than being deterred, the Able Team grenadier stuck an M-433 HEDP round into his launcher and fired. When the dual-purpose round touched the wall of the hangar, its copper armor-penetrating shrapnel charge spit out the prefab wall material and molten metal in a cone of lethal devastation that slashed through whatever defenders stood on the other side of the door. Screams of agony split the air.

Lyons emptied his DSA through the hole, then transitioned to his six-inch Colt Python. The airplane access doors groaned ominously and buckled as a thunderous force exerted itself. Moments after the doors deformed, they toppled over, concussive force shearing them from their moorings. Inside, a Cessna Stationaire idled, its propeller sucking smoke from the detonations into spirals of inky grayness. The dark-clad, blond figure stood in a half-open door and brought up a pair of flashing Uzi submachine guns.

Lyons and Blancanales dived for cover as a salvo of 9 mm slugs stabbed at them. The Able Team leader grunted as his body armor stopped a pair of slugs, and he triggered the Colt Python, knowing it wouldn’t be enough to stop the prop plane. He missed the twin-machine-pistol-wielding enemy leader as the Cessna shot forward. Another plane closed its access door and followed the lead plane, but having started later, it was slower, enabling Blancanales to cut loose with his FAL rifle.

The engine belched smoke as 7.62 mm slugs tore into it. The high-velocity bullets shattered the pistons, freezing up the propeller. Lyons let the Python drop to the tarmac and he unslung his Mossberg 500. Tromboning the slide, he hammered a blast of slugs into the fuselage and passenger cabin. Twelve-gauge missiles punched through fiberglass and flesh, tearing into the gunmen jammed into the back of the plane.

Blancanales’s grenade launcher chugged loudly, a third Cessna disappearing in a cloud of flame and splinters.

All the while, Lyons watched the lead plane, and the enemy commander, the same slender figure who’d raced into the darkness before. The Cessna climbed until it was a tiny speck in thousands of miles of empty sky. It was out of eyesight in a minute, but it was not out of sight of the satellites that the Farm had watching the airstrip.

“That’s twice you’ve gotten away,” Lyons snarled. “But we’ll see where you’re going. There won’t be a third time.”

CHAPTER FIVE

The Pacific, en route to Thailand

As they were making their preparations for the penetration into China, there were a few things on Phoenix Force’s side.

The first was the requirement that orbital launch stations be as close to the equator as possible, which limited the facility to being on the southern coast of the nation, far closer to the equator than even NASA’s launch center in Cape Canaveral. While Florida was below the 25th Parallel, the south China coast was well below the 20th Parallel, the Tropic of Cancer. The nearness to the equator added to the facility of getting to orbital velocity by using the Earth’s rotation for help. Since space vehicles orbited simply by missing the Earth’s surface and atmosphere in their million-mile “fall,” it required less energy to attain the altitude necessary to enable that skillful task of throwing themselves at the ground and missing.

Considering the nature of Stony Man Farm’s previous conflicts with the Chinese government in their sponsorship of terrorism and espionage against the United States, Phoenix Force and the Farm had developed dozens of infiltration protocols to get into the nation, contingencies that had been set up for other enemy nations that sponsored the atrocities McCarter and his men spent their lives fighting against. Actually using one of those contingency plans wasn’t something that McCarter relished, but there was the chance that this operation might be coming to the Chinese government’s rescue.

McCarter mused on that for a moment as he reassembled his CZ P.01 pistol. A modern update of his favored Browning Hi-Power, with its safety replaced by an easy-to-reach decocking lever, it had the same ergonomics and high capacity as his preferred Browning, but its Czech origin meant it wouldn’t be traced back to the U.S. if it was lost in the heat of battle. He’d field-stripped the gun to ensure the mechanism was sound, with no burrs on any springs or bearing surfaces that could have compromised reliability. He loaded a 13-round magazine into the butt of the gun, racked the slide, thumbed down the decocker and holstered it. The P.01s were Czech police issue, but used 9 mm ammunition available around the world, including China. The same went for Phoenix Force’s Type 95 assault rifles. The compact bullpups were ugly, and oddly balanced, but they were tough, reliable and used Chinese military ammunition, the 5.8 mm cartridge easily garnered from enemy forces. His and Calvin James’s rifles were fitted with 35 mm under-barrel grenade launchers, while Gary Manning eschewed the compact bullpup for the NORINCO Type 79 self-loading sniper rifle. The Phoenix Force marksman preferred having a long-range weapon, and the 7.62 mm round had an effective range of 1300 meters.

There would be no disguising their appearance, so the team was decked out with a variant of the Land Warrior combat suit. Stony Man Farm had helped them out with the camouflage pattern that would match the area they were inserting into. The Land Warrior suits were complex weaves of Kevlar and Nomex that T. J. Hawkins and Gary Manning were currently stenciling camou patterns onto. The rifles were being color detailed with camouflage paint by Rafael Encizo while Calvin James went over his medical kit to ensure that they were ready for whatever infections and injuries they could incur. Radiation poison inoculations were also being set up, given the chance of external exposure to lethal Iridium-132. The dense, radioactive metal could cause gamma radiation burns and poisoning.

A layer of charcoal filtering underneath the Land Warrior suits would provide some protection, but gamma radiation was of a powerful, high-frequency energy wave that required high-density materials, such as lead aprons, to stop it. Unfortunately, that kind of protective covering would prove too bulky to wear into a stealth operation, and would hinder movement to such a degree that a firefight would leave them as practically stationary targets.

McCarter’s satellite phone warbled and he picked it up. “News?”

“We’ve been digging into SAD internal communiqués. We ended up with a few discarded, zero-filed memos in their trash,” Barbara Price announced. “Someone’s keeping information in SAD from getting out about anomalies in their military launch programs. The higher-ups are not getting discrepancies in field reports on their threat matrix because someone’s deleting them.”

“I knew it didn’t make sense for the Chinese to try something big against the International Space Station,” McCarter said. “It’s too risky a move that could start a nuclear exchange.”

“Renegade factions inside Chinese intel?” Price mused. “Or someone who tapped into them?”

“We’ll have a chinwag with the blokes running the joint when we drop in, Barb,” McCarter returned.

“We’ll keep tracing SAD communications to see if there’s evidence of a larger conspiracy within the government,” Price said. “So far, the way they’re smoke stacking the information, it looks like it might just be a small cadre involved, probably reinforced by international support.”

A beep sounded, distracting Price. She put McCarter on hold for a few moments.

“We’ve got confirmation of activity in Mexico,” Price broke in. “Able encountered a group of enemy soldiers in Sonora, utilizing an airstrip. They reinforced it with antiaircraft machine guns and a full squadron of aircraft on hand.”

“Any escapes?” McCarter asked.

“Carl has confirmed that the same one who got away from them at the border was at the strip. He took off under a wave of suppression fire, but he was the only one who did,” Price said. “We’ve got satellites tracking their plane.”

McCarter rubbed his chin. “Then he won’t get away.”

“You sound doubtful,” Price noted.

McCarter looked at the satellite photographs of the Phoenix Graveyard launch facility. “They obviously have to know that their activities are being watched by us. We’ve got enough eyes in the sky—”

“Image failure,” Price interrupted. “Bear’s reporting that we’ve lost satellite imaging on your insertion point.”

“Looks like the Chinese have found their own copy of the antisatellite laser that Striker took out a while ago,” McCarter commented. “It’s no surprise that the Chinese ‘borrow’ technology from the Russians, whether Moscow wants them to or not.”

“Damn it!” Price exclaimed. “Bear, we need to get on the horn to NRO now. Shift orbits for their birds over Sonora now.”

“It’ll take time to shift aim to take out anything in the sky over Mexico,” McCarter stated. “We’re talking vastly different orbital arcs.”

“Not necessarily,” Price returned. “So far, our flyer is heading due south and skimming the dune tops, hoping to lose himself in ground clutter through Mexican airspace. Obviously, our boy will have a refueling point somewhere in his operational range, and the time it takes to reach that distance, the laser might be recalibrated and ready to take down those satellites.”

“Do you have anything else?” McCarter asked.

“We’re monitoring VOR and local airfield radar, but again, he’s flying nap of the earth,” Price stated.