Incendiary Dispatch. Don Pendleton

sneered Tokaido, looking at the video on the well-mounted video screen. “You could put them there with a rowboat.”

      He was glaring at the screen, his eyes glinting. The young Japanese hacker looked—what? Enraged?

      Tokaido had been with Stony Man Farm for several years. He had seen much. Why, Price wondered, was he taking this one so personally?

      Or was that just her imagination?

      Tokaido abruptly thrust his finger at the frozen image of the tanker on the huge plasma screen.

      “Fucker!” he snarled.

      The way that Tokaido went back to his computer, Price thought he was going to start pounding the keys with his fists.

      Wethers, Delahunt and Kurtzman had all stopped what they were doing. Kurtzman met her eyes before he returned to rattling the keys of his own terminal.

      Price hit Play and watched the playback from China. The local time code started at 4:06 a.m., the moment the quick-thinking BBC staffer got his camera going. By 4:33 a.m. local time the black hulk of the Northern Aurora had vanished behind a lake of flame. The lake spread. Price watched with horrified fascination as the orange brilliance illuminated the shore and the buildings and then seemed to swallow them up. There were explosions. Ship after ship was being consumed in the flame. At least two more oil tankers were engulfed and burned until they blossomed and added their own fuel to the flames. The voice of the reporter standing behind the camera described the oil spill’s creep along the shore of the bay. Buildings were being set ablaze. Thousands being evacuated from the shoreline as the fire jumped to the buildings and spread inland.

      The vivid image of the bay was of half blackness and half conflagration, but the blackness continued to shrink. The fire seemed to have sensed the voyeurs in the hotel and was coming after them.

      “We’re leaving the camera,” the reporter said. It was odd, hearing the voices of a bunch of Brits in a hotel room. The oil fire itself was silent.

      “Let’s go!” the reporter said a moment later.

      Then viewers around the world heard the door to the hotel room open and slam shut. There were no more voices. Just the camera’s unique view of the fire that seemed now to reach to the horizon.

      The attacks had happened less than an hour ago. The damage still had a long way to spread.

      Over the next twenty minutes the satellite-fed footage of the flames crawling to the hotel was dramatic and terrifying. Then a new kind of smoke appeared in front of the fire. Close-proximity fumes. The hotel itself was finally burning.

      CHAPTER FIVE

      The rugged British commando, leader of one of the deadliest paramilitary units on the planet, was drinking on the job.

      Drinking heavily. He upended the bottle and sucked out 500 ml of the brown liquid and kept sucking until the plastic bottle collapsed noisily upon itself. Then he released it into a trash can beside one of the computer desks and savagely twisted the plastic cap off of a second bottle.

      The big plasma screen had been replaying news feeds from all over the world for three hours. How many times were they going to show this bloody piece of video? It must have been the tenth time he’d seen it.

      But he couldn’t look away.

      It was the video from the reporter and his cameraman out of a small station in Casper, Wyoming. They’d driven pretty far out of their way to get some video of a protest staged against the mayor of a little town called Shambert. Protesters didn’t agree with his budgeting priorities.

      Then the pipelines blew and a sea of flaming crude oil swamped the town. The reporter and his cameraman had been broadcasting live as they careened wildly through Shambert, trying to find an escape route.

      “Get ’em!”

      It was already a famous sound bite. It was the cameraman shouting as a group of young men staggered into the streets, faces covered by their shirts from the already acrid smoke. For a second, you thought the cameraman was telling the reporter to just run the young men down to get out of town faster.

      But the reporter was stomping on the brakes and the cameraman was shouting again. “We gotta get ’em!”

      The cameraman screamed out the window. The young men piled into the news van. They screeched away—but maybe the reporter and cameraman shouldn’t have been Good Samaritans. Maybe they shouldn’t have taken those precious seconds to pick up those young men. Maybe they could have saved themselves, at least, if they’d had a few extra seconds to spare.

      There was one way out of town left to them, and the oil was already advancing. The reporter tried to drive through the wall of flame. He had no other option. And he did manage to make it through. He reached the other side of the fire. But the van became drenched in burning oil. The men inside were shouting. It was mayhem.

      Thank God the news network stopped the tape before the shouting turned to screaming. Once those men started screaming, the camera had continued to operate for eleven seconds. It sent eleven seconds of live video and audio around the world to millions of viewers. A lot of people had listened to those five men die.

      The big Brit with the bottle had seen some seriously bad things in his life, but he never again wanted to hear the screaming of the men in that news van as they burned.

      There was a different tape now and some female reporter was running down the latest list of attack sites. It just went on and on.

      “What is that?”

      Carl Lyons was there, staring at the Brit’s freshly opened bottle. It was red and sported a bright white logo in Arabic.

      David McCarter waved the bottle dismissively. “Egyptian Coca-Cola. Carl, do we have anything to go on?”

      “Not yet. They’re tearing it up back there.” Lyons nodded back into the depths of the Farm. McCarter understood what he meant—the cybernetics team ripping through the systems of the world in search of clues.

      “What about arrests?”

      “I just got here three minutes ago. I don’t know a thing.”

      McCarter shook his head miserably. “How’s Pol?”

      “Been better,” Rosario “Politician” Blancanales answered, trying not to limp when he came into the War Room.

      “You been cleared by the doc?” Lyons demanded. “I thought you were on bed rest for another forty-eight hours.”

      Blancanales’s attention was engaged for a moment by the bottle in McCarter’s hand, then he said. “I’m good to go. We got a target?”

      “No,” Lyons replied. He wasn’t fooled for a second by Blancanales’s evasive response.

      Blancanales’s circulatory system had been severely compromised. At the little hospital in Georgia, they had pumped every pint of compatible blood in the medical center into Blancanales before his skin began to resume something like its normal color—Lyons never would have thought Blancanales’s Hispanic complexion could have gone as pale as it had been when they’d first run him into that little E.R. They’d performed a quick, temporary stitch-up job to close the wound. Hours later, Blancanales had been transported to a larger hospital in Atlanta, where a surgeon sliced out a thin millimeter of dead flesh on either side of the wound, along with the blackened particles of burned material that had cut into him.

      Blancanales hadn’t even noticed it—the moment when he was cut open by an orange-hot fragment of flying debris in the bowels of Solon Labs.

      Lyons and Schwarz had fled the explosions deep into the lab and found themselves surrounded in flames. Blancanales rendezvoused with them there, in the biggest lab, where all kinds of equipment and materials were igniting, burning, melting and bursting. Something had exploded and Blancanales got in the way of a piece of shrapnel that burned through his armor, his clothing and his skin.