Terror Descending. Don Pendleton

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      T AKING A CORNER on two wheels, Lyons angled sharply into a parking garage and took the ramp to the second level at breakneck speed. Smashing aside a row of bright orange safety cones, the Stony Man commando slammed on the brakes as the back of a huge Mack truck came into view.

      Decelerating quickly, Lyons had the SUV down to only 50 mph when he hit the sloped sheet of corrugated steel leading into the open rear of the cargo truck. The front end crashed against the metal, throwing the people inside hard against their seat belts, the bloody mannequin in the passenger seat—Bloody Bob—flopping wildly. As the interior of the truck filled his sight, Lyons threw the SUV into Reverse. The transmission gave a metallic groan, then slammed the vehicle to a halt, a barrage of shrapnel blowing out the bottom as gears shattered under the abrupt change in direction.

      Rocking slightly back and forth on the shock absorbers, the men in the SUV clawed at their seat belts as the blacksuits from the Farm dropped the access ramp, then swung the doors closed. Darkness descended with a strident clang.

      Only a few seconds later there came the sound of a police siren racing past the truck, then fading into the distance as the cops streaked along the ramps of the empty garage, going higher and higher.

      “Well, that was interesting,” Hermann Schwarz said, wiping his mustache clean with a palm. The hand came away streaked with crimson, none of it from him. “You know, I’ve had fun before, and this isn’t it.” Standing average height, and sporting plain brown hair, Schwarz was an ordinary-looking man, and there was nothing about him to show that “Gadgets” was one of the top electronics experts in the world.

      “You can say that again, brother,” Rosario “The Politician” Blancanales muttered, brushing back his wavy crop of salt-and-pepper hair. Built along a more stocky frame, Blancanales had been a Black beret before joining the Stony Man team, and although an expert in psychological warfare, he radiated physical strength the way a furnace did heat.

      Schwarz glanced forward. “Carl, how’s Bob doing?”

      “He’s dead,” Lyons said, reaching over to shake the human-size mannequin. At the touch, more red fluid gushed from the wound in its head, and a few more plastic teeth sprayed forward to bounce off the dashboard, sounding like rattling dice.

      “Damn. Don’t think I can fix him this time,” Schwarz said with a frown. “And still make him appear human.”

      “Fair enough. He’s ready for permanent retirement,” Blancanales agreed, placing his Colt 1911 on the seat. “Let him rest in peace.”

      “Rest in pieces, you mean,” Schwarz said, chuckling as he reached under the seat to extract a briefcase.

      In the front seat, Lyons merely grunted at the feeble joke as he pulled the Atchisson shotgun from the stiff fingers of the mannequin and started wiping the weapon down with a damp cloth to remove the sticky theatrical blood. Personally, Lyons was glad the charade had come off without a hitch. Time was short, and with no other place to start an investigation, this desperate plan was their only way to try to find the Airwolves, and their pretend streetfight could have gone wrong in a hundred different ways. Thankfully there had been no real accidents. The cop who had died in the police car chasing them had only been the sister of Bob, Dyin’ Donna, operated by Schwarz by remote control.

      In a muted rumble, the big diesel engine of the Mack truck lumbered into life, revving a few times to build power before smoothly moving forward.

      Now that the team was in motion once more, Schwarz opened the briefcase and tucked the partially loaded Beretta into the soft gray foam, followed by the Colt. Then the man extracted a duplicate pair of weapons, only these were adorned with tiny splotches of yellow paint to mark them as real weapons. Passing the Colt to Blancanales, Schwarz briefly inspected the Beretta before slipping in a magazine of live ammunition.

      Rubbing off the yellow paint, Blancanales did the same to his Colt. Long ago, the team had learned that using blanks in their weapons to simulate a firefight would not fool professionals. The guns looked the same and sounded the same, but the blanks shot out a feeble spray of sparks from the end of the muzzle instead of a hot lance of flame the way a live round did. That was the kind of mistake that could easily cost lives. So for these kinds of maneuvers, the Stony Man operatives used theatrical weapons acquired from a Hollywood production company.

      The safe weapons were identical to real guns, but the interior of the barrel was throttled down to only a slim passage so that the quarter-charge of powder in the cartridges sent off a very realistic-looking muzzle flash. There was even enough of a kick to operate the complex loading mechanism and cycle in the next round. Which was how a studio had its pampered movie stars dramatically fire off machine guns in a film without them looking foolish, or worse, accidentally killing somebody. Blanks sent off wads of cardboard, supposedly harmless, but under the right conditions, they could break bones, and occasionally the cheap brass in the cartridges shattered, sending out a deadly spray of razor-sharp metal that killed every bit as easily as hot lead.

      With a jounce, the truck exited the parking garage and started along High Street, heading northward. The police cars howled in the distance, moving east along Main Street.

      “Mighty nice of the local cops to help us out on this,” Schwarz said, threading a sound suppressor onto the barrel of his Beretta before holstering the weapon.

      “Anything СКАЧАТЬ