to have already melted and sagged. Blancanales felt as if he was cooking in his own skin. He looked into all the corners, searching for his teammates.
“No sign of them yet, Stony,” Blancanales announced.
“No response,” replied the cool female voice in his ear.
“Lyons! Gadgets, damn it!” Blancanales shouted. He raced to the far side of the room. It was one of the omnipresent steel fire doors.
And it was burning.
He shouldered through it, into the next section of the labs.
“Lyons!” Blancanales demanded of the roaring fire. Hungry flames were growing fat on shelves of stored paperwork. The heat was almost unbearable. The floor was covered with smoking, foot-wide craters. What were those all about?
Rosario Blancanales was suddenly angry. What the hell was going on here? Who the hell were these amateur intruders and what kind of freakish explosion had just gone off?
And where had Lyons and Schwarz been at the time of the explosion?
His arrived at another steel fire door. Why the hell were the fire doors freaking burning? Blancanales knew what an incendiary grenade did—spit out molten metal bits that burned through anything they touched. This was way more than a few incendiary grenades. There were streaks of burning steel.
He kicked the door savagely with the bottom of one foot, opening into a jungle of fire, where some kind of electrical system had spilled out ropes of bundled wire that now burned floor to ceiling along with the furniture, books and lab equipment. Clouds of acrid smoke were collecting at the ceiling. Blancanales tried not to breathe but the wisps that he did inhale felt toxic and the blast of heat almost bowled him over. Something burst nearby, spewing orange, red-hot worms.
“Lyons!” Blancanales bellowed. “Schwarz!”
Then something big came leaping through the vines of fire and crashed at Blancanales’s feet. It was Carl Lyons, tangled in a strand of burning cable. He rolled away, extinguishing the flames that clung to his black BDUs. Blancanales snatched off a tangle of wire but a strand of melting insulation stuck to Lyon’s clothing like glue.
Then Hermann Schwarz charged through the flames, rolled once and was back on his feet, making a quick search of his body for anything that was still on fire.
“No way out!” Schwarz shouted over the heightening roar.
“Yeah, this way, come on!” Blancanales led the way back in the direction he had come. The conflagration in each room had grown progressively more intense within seconds. The fire was reaching out as if trying to grab them.
Blancanales heard a crash behind him. Carl Lyons had just dumped his pack to the ground. Lyons, without slowing, unceremoniously snatched the small pack off of Schwarz’s shoulder.
“Huh?” Schwarz demanded, shielding his eyes from the horrific heat and stinging fumes, but he could see that his pack was smoldering.
Blancanales slipped off his own smoking pack and left it in the room with the corpses of the two intruders. The room was biggest of the lab workrooms and it was an inferno. Blancanales felt his skin cooking and his lungs were exploding as if he were drowning—but he didn’t dare take another breath. One inhalation of the superheated air might just drop him in his tracks. His vision was a mass of orange and black. He saw the stairway entrance framed in fire and staggered into it.
The temperature was cooler and he allowed himself a sip of air. It was still so hot it burned his nostrils and he slowed to watch behind him. Schwarz came through. A heartbeat passed.
Then Lyons.
They called Lyons “Ironman.” It had been his nickname since long before any superhero movie and he had earned it by toughing out some of the most horrific battles any soldier had ever endured.
But now it looked as though the Ironman was about to crumple. Blancanales shoved Schwarz ahead and got behind Lyons, shouldering into him to keep him moving. The climb up the stairs seemed interminable, then they were into the upper hall. No sign of flame. But the wall trim along the floor was smoking.
“Go!” Blancanales ordered, shoving Schwarz and Lyons, and it was like trying to keep a pair of drunk wrestlers in motion. The trio staggered down the hall. Blancanales felt his feet burning. The sticky rubber toes of his boots were melting. Something liquid sloshed onto the floor and sizzled and Blancanales smelled griddled blood.
Somebody was bleeding buckets.
Lyons seemed to swerve slightly and Blancanales grabbed him around the waist.
Lyons grumbled something about being okay, and then they were in the exit stairs.
There was a rush of air behind them. The stairwell they had left seconds before went up in a fireball. A roar of flame erupted below them. The walls around them were now on fire. They careened down two flights and reached the landing. They saw two doors. One had a darkened exit sign. Smoke poured from the second door and Blancanales swore he actually saw it bulge.
“Out!” he insisted. The three of them pushed through the exit door.
Blancanales felt like he was in paradise—he gratefully inhaled the sweet, cool air of the Georgia night.
He stumbled over a body. It was the intruder whose knee he had shattered. The man had managed to crawl down the stairs and onto the grounds surrounding the Solon Labs. He was either dead or had passed out from the pain. Blancanales grabbed the man by the collar, intending to drag him farther away from the burning building.
But the body seemed to weigh a ton. Blancanales couldn’t budge him, and a quick pulse check told him that man was beyond help.
It also dawned on Blancanales that it wasn’t the body getting heavier that was the problem. It was himself, getting weaker.
Then he saw another spill of blood. It was his blood, and a lot of it.
No wonder he felt weak.
Blancanales collapsed alongside the dead intruder.
CHAPTER TWO
Lyons, Schwarz and Blancanales were members of Able Team, a supersecret covert-operations team based at Stony Man Farm.
Carl Lyons was fighting to sit upright in his helicopter seat without the seat belt. But he wasn’t sure Rosario Blancanales would even be able to stay alive for the next twenty minutes.
“Rosario’s in bad shape,” Lyons said into the mike on his headset.
“What is the nature of his injury?” Barbara Price asked.
“We haven’t figured that out yet. Gadgets is working on it.”
Hermann Schwarz had Blancanales strapped into the seat beside him and was ripping the man’s blood-drenched shirt off in shreds. “No broken bones. No sign of head trauma. But I can’t find the wound!” he said in frustration.
Then he found it. The last strip of the black BDU blouse came off Blancanales’s torso and there was a long, deep channel of black meandering across the man’s side,
