Incendiary Dispatch. Don Pendleton

      CHAPTER SIX

      Stony Man pilot Jack Grimaldi zipped them on a straight-line northwest flight over Virginia. Grimaldi was another veteran staffer of Stony Man Farm, one of many recruited back when Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, targeted the Mafia. Grimaldi had been a Mafia pilot, but Bolan had convinced him to switch sides.

      When Bolan’s efforts shifted from mobsters to terrorists, and when the covert agency now based at Stony Man Farm was assembled to coordinate the activities of Bolan and the teams of black-operations commandos he had recruited, Grimaldi was on board.

      His toy for today was an MD-600N, a sweet piece of helicopter engineering from McDonnell Douglas. It was fast. It was quiet. It didn’t look military. In fact, Stony Man had nameplates at the ready to make it look like a news chopper or a local SWAT mover. Today, there was no logo. Nobody was supposed to be in the air—nobody. Around Washington, D.C., the no-fly zone was being enthusiastically enforced, and it took some quick behind-the-scenes work by the Farm before the Army UH-60 Black Hawk that was trying to force them to land got a cease-and-desist order.

      Able Team exited the helicopter before the skids fully settled on the parking lot of an abandoned warehouse. Blancanales got behind the wheel of a black Explorer, a vehicle with run-flat tires, power-boosting accessories under the hood, and body panels that were designed to withstand bullets and shrapnel.

      They drove less than a mile and Schwarz and Lyons exited the vehicle near the station. The big Alexandria, Virginia, parking lot was eerily quiet. The trains were not running today, and wouldn’t be running anytime soon. Schwarz and Lyons avoided the security personnel posted at the station and slipped through the darkness and into the weeds before stepping onto the tracks.

      “We’re on-site, Stony,” the Able Team leader said into his headset.

      “We’re tracking you, Carl. You’re a hundred feet away and closing.”

      Lyons’s MV-321G Gen 3 night-vision goggles were equipped with infrared illumination. The plan was for him to use night vision while Schwarz conducted a naked-eyes search. So far the track was so well lit by overhead lighting that Lyons didn’t need the NVGs.

      They watched the tracks, looking for signs of devices that didn’t belong. Tokaido’s little track-back trick had triangulated the location of just one of the cell phones. The reports of the latest wave of attacks—including derailments on several commuter and cargo railroads in the United States and around the world—suggested there would be half a dozen devices planted along the tracks. Whoever was doing this, obviously wanted to do the job completely.

      They were still ten yards from the location of the specific tracked device when Schwarz froze.

      “I think I’ve got one.”

      “Show us, Able,” Price said through the headset.

      Schwarz pulled out a video camera, offering far higher resolution than the video feed from the lipstick-size video pickups on his headset. He pointed it at the device nestled against the steel rail of the Fredericksburg Line.

      “Manning is seeing it. Cowboy’s here, too,” Price announced. John “Cowboy” Kissinger was the Stony Man Farm armorer.

      “Looks like a rock,” Gary Manning announced from his seat on a jet over the Atlantic Ocean.

      “I’m no ballistics expert like Gary,” Kissinger said, “but I’d have to agree that it looks like a rock.”

      “You’re a big help,” Schwarz said. “Can’t thank you guys enough. See the plastic foam on the bottom? It’s adhered to the metal. Bonding agent of some kind. They have it glued to the track itself so they can be sure the rail is damaged by the blast.”

      “Gadgets,” Manning said, “you can’t touch that thing. What if it’s got a motion-sensing trigger?”

      Schwarz snorted. “It’s super-glued to the rail of a commuter train line. It’s been getting rattled for days.”

      “Gadgets—” Lyons said.

      “Hey, you don’t have to tell me to be careful,” Schwarz said. “We don’t have to touch it. We’ll move it from a distance.”

      Schwarz pulled out a small, dense wedge of steel on a metallic spike. He pulled a safety strip to activate it, then impaled the thing in the ground, within a half inch of the device on the rail track.

      They moved away from the device, along the curve of the track.

      “Able Three here,” Blancanales said on the line from his lookout in the Explorer. “Get to cover. Company coming. Two white males.”

      Schwarz and Lyons blended into the bushes.

      “They’re walking the rails,” Blancanales added from his vantage point. “They might be Virginia Railway Express track inspectors.”

      “That’s to be expected.”

      “Looks like one of them is armed.”

      That was hardly out of the question either, Lyons thought, given the state of high anxiety in the nation and the fact that railroads had just become demonstrated targets.

      “Any other equipment, Pol?” he asked quietly.

      “No.”

      “Doesn’t make sense,” Lyons commented. “Patrols should be obviously armed. Inspectors should have equipment.”

      “Let’s ask them,” Schwarz suggested, extracting his Beretta 93-R, a handgun based on the well-known Beretta 92. One serious difference in the design: a selector switch that enabled the handgun to fire three-round bursts.

      * * *

      ROSARIO BLANCANALES LEFT the Explorer and followed the path taken earlier by Lyons and Schwarz. He moved quickly. There was a dull ache from the sutures in his gut. A dull ache was nothing compared to the pain he’d woken up with after the firestorm in Georgia.

      He didn’t like what was happening. More than that, Blancanales knew that Stony Man was in a bad, bad place. What intelligence they had so far served them little in tracking down whoever was causing this mayhem. They needed information. They needed a source.

      “Able Three here,” he said quietly. “I’m in position alongside the tracks.”

      “Don’t engage,” Lyons said.

      “Don’t plan to,” Blancanales replied. “I’m concealed. I’m the fly on the wall.”

      The two men approached. The one in front had a firearm held close to his leg, on the far side of his body where Blancanales only glimpsed it. The other followed a few steps behind. The body language of the follower said “nervous.”

      They were moving quickly now, half jogging. There was no cover here, unless they decided to crawl through the bushes where Encizo was camped.

      Blancanales kept his mike wide open. Nothing to boost the audio. The Farm wasn’t going to hear much of this.

      “Another