Lyons looked at the license plates. “They forgot to forge plates with the proper business coding on them. That vehicle’s only got stickers for nonperishable food delivery, not air freight.”
Blancanales shook his head. “You with the electronics, and him with the memorizing every possible type of license plate. Are you two attempting to make me feel like a fifth wheel here?”
Lyons winked. “Nothing could match your seven hundred years of experience, Methuselah.”
“We hadn’t run the plates yet,” Blancanales said, steering the conversation away from the fact that he was the oldest man in the van and on the team. “We simply tracked down the signal and I realized that there was no one on this street that had received a delivery, and no one had left that truck.”
Lyons looked along the sidewalks. “I might just make detectives out of you two jungle fighters yet.”
Schwarz sighed. “Detectives. That’s why God and Al Gore invented the Internets, Ironman. To make actual gumshoe work obsolete.”
Blancanales regarded Lyons. “Not going to tear the doors off of their van?”
“I want to see if they make a pickup instead of a delivery,” Lyons replied. “Gadgets, you have a camera focused on the undercarriage of that truck, right?”
Schwarz looked back at Lyons, sincerely offended this time by the implication that he wouldn’t have done what his leader had suggested. “You trust me to plant a bomb in a microcomputer in the space of fifteen seconds before thieves can run off with it, but when I’m sitting right behind a suspicious enemy vehicle, you doubt that I’ve already been recording it for the time it took for the CSI team to run all their fingerprints and blood-spray patterns?”
Schwarz flicked on a monitor attached to the dashboard before Lyons could answer. A high-quality view of the underside of the van was visible. “The monitor would have turned on because I have a sensor in the camera set up to activate at the first motion.”
Lyons patted Schwarz on the shoulder. “You just earned the weekends of the Consumer Electronics Show and the Electronic Entertainment Expo free. Barring end-of-the world crises.”
“Yay,” Schwarz droned, trying to seem unexcited, but Lyons knew exactly the kind of electronic geekery that went on for those two weekends. The monitor flickered, indicating a change in the ground-level camera view. “Okay, something just moved a storm grating in the shadow of the curb.”
Lyons squinted at the ten-inch monitor. “Come on, you son of a bitch, show yourself.”
The metal grille tottered, then flopped over. A bulbous, silvery head emerged from under the sidewalk. As Schwarz muttered about a downgrade of hydraulic efficiency from Lyons’s gunshot, movement on the sidewalk drew the Able Team leader’s attention. A man was pushing a stroller down the street.
“It should have been able to push the grating over a little more easily,” Schwarz commented.
“I’d hit it with my .357 Smith,” Lyons said distractedly, watching the man and the toddler walk closer to the delivery van.
That brought a grin to Schwarz’s face. “Able Team. Travel the world. Meet technological wonders. Shoot them to pieces.”
“’Kin A,” Lyons agreed softly.
The robotic inchworm crawled toward the center of the truck’s undercarriage. A panel opened above it, and two hands reached down to grasp it.
“We’ve got the bas—” Lyons began.
“It’s a segment too long,” Schwarz cut him off.
Lyons’s attention flitted from the monitor to the father and child on the street. He exploded out of his seat, jumping to the sidewalk and charging toward the delivery truck. He didn’t need an explanation about the nature of Schwarz’s grim, sudden warning. He took off from the Able Team van as if launched from the barrel of a gun as fast as his powerful leg muscles could propel him.
“Carl! Wait!” he heard Blancanales call out.
It was too late to stop Lyons as he drew upon his high school and college football conditioning to rocket him down the sidewalk with explosive speed. Each thrust of his powerful leg muscles carried him closer to the delivery van and the two bystanders who were now even with the stopped vehicle. The young father looked up from his child in the stroller, seeing the human freight train barrelling toward them both. Lyons unfurled his massive arms and scooped up father and infant. The Able Team commander twisted himself so that his broad back would absorb the shock wave that he expected to erupt. It came an instant later, the brown metal skin billowing out. Thankfully the hull of the truck was not pre-scored metal so that when it split due to the rupturing overpressure of the exploding robot, no shrapnel flew from the delivery van, though Lyons had his Kevlar on under his shirt and jacket. Lyons’s forward momentum had carried all three of them past the torn vent in the side of the truck, sparing the trio exposure to a gout of flame that vomited through the wound in the vehicle.
Outside, in open air, the pressure wave had space to roll and disperse, sparing the Able Team leader and the two bystanders. The men inside of the truck would have had no such dispersal as the atmosphere inside of the vehicle could only compress so much before it crushed the bodies it was trapped with. Any living leads had been pulverized by the self-destruct mechanism in the robot.
“Y-you saved us,” the man stammered.
Lyons set down the stroller, unhooking the crying toddler within. He handed the girl off to dad after a quick examination for shrapnel injuries or possible burns. The father had suffered a scraped elbow, but the baby had been shielded from sidewalk rash by Lyons’s body and her crumpled stroller. “Just calm your little girl down and go home.”
“What…is this, a terrorist attack?” the man inquired.
“No. It’s just a couple of crooks being silenced by their boss,” Lyons explained. “You didn’t see anything, but don’t stick around, all right? Just make sure the kid’s fine.”
The girl’s wails subsided as her father cradled her. “Thank you.”
Lyons nodded and waved him off.
Schwarz and Blancanales had run up to the gutted van, but the heat of the fire inside kept them at bay. Lyons jogged back around toward his partners, phone already in hand.
“Barb, we have an explosion four blocks north of the Department of Energy offices. Get on the press and the Justice Department and start spinning that it’s organized crime related, and totally independent of the murder of Mare. Keep this from being released as a terrorist attack,” Lyons said to Stony Man.
“You found the robot?” Price asked.
“Yes, and it had a self-destruct mechanism inside,” Lyons told her. “We won’t get anything from the punks who delivered it.”
“I’ll put word forward to Calvin and Rafael,” Price replied. “They’re following another van with a mystery load in the vicinity of Inshas.”
“Relay to them that the robot I encuntered had built-in Tasers and a wire whip that cuts through aluminum and flesh like butter,” Lyons added.
“Given the Israeli situation at Negev,
