Jack,” Bolan said. “You know you’ve got a pretty decent bedside manner?”
“No, I don’t,” Grimaldi replied. “I’m about to spoil your mood. You want the bad news or the bad news?”
Bolan said nothing. He raised an eyebrow.
“We’ve got a big problem,” Grimaldi explained. He produced a replacement earbud and his own secure satellite phone. “I can use the transmitter here in the chopper to relay to the Farm,” he said. “Use my phone. The earbud is from the spares here.”
“The problem?” Bolan prompted.
“Idle hands,” Grimaldi said. “You didn’t find Shane Hyde at the second target house,” he said. “I know, because I’ve been talking to the Farm while you were out. Shane Hyde and his Twelfth Reich boys have been very busy. If he was here, he was long gone before you got yourself blown up.”
“Doing what?”
“I’ll let Barb tell you that,” Grimaldi said. He pointed to the earbud. “You’re hooked in through the chopper.”
Bolan put the device in his ear. “Striker here.”
“Striker?” Barbara Price sounded worried. “Jack says you’ve sustained some injuries. If you need to come in—”
“Negative,” Bolan said. “I’m all right, Barb.”
She paused. “All right. Striker, what I have for you is significant. Bear and his computer team have identified, through a series of account transfers and our internet chatter algorithms, a hijacking perpetrated by Twelfth Reich.”
“Perpetrated as in already conducted?” Bolan asked.
“As in happening right now,” Price said. “We’ve checked it at the source and we’re confident it’s ongoing. So is the domestic intelligence network. Right now Hal is sitting on DHS and the Bureau, who are gearing up to take action. Hal held out for confirmation from you. He’s pushing hard to get you in on this.”
“What is it?”
“Do you remember O’Connor Petroleum Prospecting?”
“Yeah,” Bolan said. “The oil outfit that had some trouble in Honduras when the dictator there nationalized their equipment and took some of their employees hostage.”
“O’Connor has finagled a deal with the relatively new government of Honduras, the powers that are in Guatemala, and the new, moderate regime in Mexico. They’re running a pipeline from newly discovered oil fields in Honduras to a refinery in Mexico, from which they’ll ship oil across the Texas border and around the country. This energy initiative is very important to the Man and, as you know only too well, is the result of some recently resolved political turbulence in all three nations.”
“Yeah,” Bolan said. “That sounds vaguely familiar.”
“We have identified a series of account transfers, among other things, that helped us identify some suspicious industrial purchases of fertilizer. There were multiple indicators that Bear, on his own time, cross-checked. The pattern emerged slowly—too slowly for us to stop it before it could begin.”
“Stop what, Barb?” Bolan asked.
“Twelfth Reich’s people have hijacked an OPP tanker train,” Price said. “We believe they’ve packed it with ammonium nitrate fuel oil bombs—ANFOs—in cargo cars attached to the tankers. They’re heading for an enormous O’Connor tank field outside of Dallas, one of the largest of its type in North America. The facility is adjacent to a kind of tent city, an encampment that has risen to serve Mexican immigrants working for O’Connor. That’s the target. Twelfth Reich wants to kill those people.”
Bolan frowned. “Likely casualties?”
“Potentially thousands,” Price said.
“Why not evacuate them?”
“These are migrant workers, Striker,” Price explained, “many of them in the country illegally. We can’t prove it, of course. The Immigration and Naturalization Service has swept the area twice now, and each time, the workers return as soon as they find gaps in the security cordon. It’s just too large an area for the INS to patrol. By the time we got enough men in there to link arms and surround it, the train would have arrived. The other problem is that, even if there is no loss of life among the workers, destroying that tank field will deal a serious blow to our economy. The waivers and other incentives needed to get all this moving with OPP were delivered because the nation needs that oil, Striker. Losing that infrastructure will wound us badly.
“The train will cross the border near Piedras Negras,” Price went on. “It will then follow a route through San Antonio, Austin and Fort Worth. The terrorists could choose to blow the train themselves at any point, but Hyde and his fanatics don’t just want to destroy a train. They want that tank field. This is their ticket to al Qaeda status, as they see it. Their death blow to the hated American regime. They want to get where they’re going.”
“So we have to stop them before they get there.”
“That’s the problem,” Price said. “We can’t erect a barrier. There’s no time for that, and anything solid enough to halt the train will blow it. Blow the track itself, derail the train, and we risk creating an environmental disaster that will kill whoever’s unlucky enough to be nearby. Strike it from the air, it explodes, taking everyone aboard with it—and that’s if you can reach it. We have intelligence indicating Hyde may be in possession of antiaircraft weaponry, purchased from the Iranians.”
“Not good.”
“It’s worse. This train is one long bomb, but it’s a bomb with hostages aboard.”
“How many?”
“There’s a very special passenger car attached, near the engine,” Price said. “O’Connor, in an effort to protect its employees from the threat of kidnapping, to avoid future occurrences of its Honduras experience, has equipped the train with an armored personnel compartment. There are close to forty employees aboard, all of them O’Connor executives, returning to Dallas from an on-site conference across the border. They attended the opening of the new Mexican refinery, apparently.”
“Those people might already be dead, Barb,” Bolan said.
“They aren’t,” she replied. “The train’s security passenger car is hardened to external assault and has self-contained communications gear. We’ve verified that OPP is in contact with its employees. The terrorists can’t get in, not without damaging the train so badly they risk derailing it themselves. But those people cannot get out, either. Not with Hyde and his skinheads waiting to take them hostage the moment they do.”
“Well,” Bolan said. “Isn’t that a pretty picture.”
“It doesn’t get much more complicated,” Price admitted.
“Not with an unknown element killing our leads,” he muttered. “Jack apprised you of the situation?”
“Fully,” Price answered. “He said you recovered some .40-caliber casings on the scene before the evidence burned?”
Bolan
