Incendiary Dispatch. Don Pendleton

his side.

      “Barb—” McCarter said as the mission controller entered the War Room.

      “We should have everybody on-site in twenty minutes,” she announced. “We’ll debrief then.” She looked at Blancanales. “Didn’t know you’d received medical clearance, Rosario.”

      “All this is looking a lot like what we saw at the lab,” Blancanales said, waving at the big plasma screen and images of burning. Pipelines. Harbors. Ships. People.

      “It does, on the surface,” she agreed.

      “What about below the surface?”

      Price shook her head slightly. “We just don’t know.”

      * * *

      THE TIME CODE on the screen read 7:35 p.m.

      The War Room hosted a full house. David McCarter’s Phoenix Force teammates were present. The three members of Able Team were there.

      Aaron Kurtzman was there with the Stony Many Farm cyberteam. Carmen Delahunt, a vivacious redhead, was a talented analyst. Huntington Wethers, a dignified black man, every inch the UCLA cybernetics professor that he had once been. And there was Akira Tokaido, the Japanese hacker. The man was snapping at the touchscreen on a tablet computer, looking as grim as anyone had ever seen him.

      Hal Brognola was on the screen from his office in Washington, D.C. Barbara Price, as mission controller, was the one that everybody started unloading on.

      “First things first,” Price said. “We’re going to go through a list of incidents.” She looked around at the gathering of faces. “It’s a long one.”

      And indeed it was.

      “Thirty major pipelines are out of commission,” Price said. “In nearly all cases, the sabotage occurred in semiremote areas where the explosive devices could be, we assume, placed in advance. It’s also clear that some locations were chosen for their geography—the places where the oil flow and fire could do the most damage.”

      “Like in Wyoming,” said Hal Brognola.

      “Yes,” Price said. “Like in Wyoming. We’re still receiving information from around the world, but there appears to be a standard approach to the sabotage. A series of small explosive devices were placed along the pipelines in advance, where they waited for a signal to detonate.”

      “Does anyone have one of those devices?” Brognola said.

      “As far as we know, most of the oil fires continue to burn and no investigation teams have been able to get to the scene of any of the actual explosions.”

      “What about Alaska?” Brognola demanded.

      “No.” Price looked at the screen. Video pickups shifted automatically even when Brognola’s image moved from one screen to another. “The pipeline attacks followed certain patterns, from what we can tell. The explosives detonated simultaneously—maybe as many as twenty to thirty small explosions at once. More in some cases.

      “The pipeline in Wyoming was opened up at approximately thirty-four locations over a distance of two miles. The oil spilled out under the pipeline pressure. There are block valve stations on the line that responded to the pressure drop automatically and immediately shut down oil flow. However, at least fifteen of the explosions took place uphill of the station that is supposed to protect the town in case of a pipeline breach. The next station shut down the pipe, but the volume of oil remaining in the pipelines was considerable and was gravity-fed into the town. Gravity-fed oil flow from punctures on the east and the west of the town fed the fires on the town limits and trapped the population inside.”

      Price was now looking at the surface of the War Room conference table, not at any of them. She opened her hand, a hopeless gesture. “The town was surrounded, blocking all escape routes.”

      The room full of people was silent for a moment.

      “Anybody get out of that town?” Carl Lyons asked.

      “It’s still burning.”

      “Oh.”

      “It’s important to note that most of these attacks were not intended to result in significant loss of life,” Aaron Kurtzman said. “Most of the pipeline attacks were not in populated areas. The intention was clearly to put these pipes out of commission. The same intention was behind the sabotage of oil tankers. We have a number of oil tankers burning or sunk, including several tankers that were nonmobile—used only for storage, not oil transport. In some ports, the damage is so widespread that it has not even been determined yet whether there was one ship sabotaged or more than one.”

      “Obviously,” Price said, “whoever did this wanted to cripple the movement of oil and get the attention of the world. They wanted there to be no doubt in anybody’s mind that they had the means to do it.”

      “So if they wanted to stop the movement of oil,” asked Rafael Encizo, one of the Phoenix Force commandos, “why’d they hit all the aircraft? A passenger jet to India, a passenger jet to Brazil—plus a cargo flight into Moscow? What am I missing here? What’s the purpose?”

      “Terror is the purpose, we must assume,” Barbara Price said. “Whoever did this wanted the world to know they could hit anywhere. Anyplace and anybody.”

      “Which brings up the big question of who?” Brognola said. “Unfortunately, we’ve got precious little to go on.”

      “How can that be?” Carl Lyons demanded. “You don’t set off five hundred bombs at once, all around the world, and not leave some evidence.”

      “Of course there’s evidence,” said Gary Manning, Phoenix Force’s demolitions expert. He was a veteran of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, where he had once served as an antiterrorist operative. He was a hulking, burly, square-jawed figure, often subdued compared to some of the other figures in his team, but never hesitant to say what was on his mind. “Half those hot spots are still burning. You think there’s been time to go in and sift through the wreckage?”

      “FBI forensic demolitions analysis teams are on-site at five pipeline explosions, including at a Trans-Alaska Pipeline site thirty miles north of the Yukon River,” Brognola said.

      “The blasts were all planned for maximum destruction. In Alaska, it seems the planning went awry,” Price said. “The pipeline wasn’t ripped apart as thoroughly as some of the others. It appears that only about a third of the explosives in the series actually detonated.”

      Kurtzman typed a command into the interface board built into his wheelchair. The onscreen image of Hal shifted to a secondary screen and a map of Alaska showing a red, thick line that indicated the route of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System appeared on the main screen. He zoomed in on Fairbanks, then followed the trail of the pipeline north until it crossed the Yukon River and headed north another thirty miles.

      “It looks as if most of the pipeline explosives included twenty to thirty shaped charges designed to go off simultaneously,” Price explained. “In Alaska, an estimated ten charges detonated simultaneously. The pipeline was damaged seriously, but not on the scale we’ve seen elsewhere around the world. We have video. Bear?”

      She nodded to Kurtzman, who brought up shaky aerial footage of empty landscape. “A station in Fairbanks rushed a chopper to the scene as soon as they heard about it,” Price said. “They started taping when they saw the smoke.” The video shifted to show a flaming, billowing canal of black oil covering the ground and surrounding what was apparently an undamaged section of the pipeline. The destroyed section of the pipe appeared small, but it was difficult to grasp the scale from the shaky camera.

      Then the pipe split open and more oil flooded out.

      Manning was leaning forward on the table, watching the video intently. “So the charges didn’t go off when they were supposed to, but as soon as the fire catches up to them they ignite.”

      “That’s what we think happened.”