Книга - Triplecross

Triplecross
Don Pendleton


Whenever duty calls, America's most elite black ops and cyber tech group is ready to deploy. Stony Man Farm acts under orders from the President to save innocent lives by taking down one terrorist at a time–even if it means losing their own lives in the process.Tensions erupt between Pakistan and India after Pakistani soldiers are found massacred in an Indian village, along with the body of an American–a businessman who had no reason to be there. Phoenix Force must stop ongoing battles in the area–skirmishes led by two rogue generals. When Able Team investigates the mining company that employed the dead American, the men are attacked by a group of mercenaries. With relations between Pakistan and India hanging in the balance, the Stony Man teams are faced with daunting missions…and the knowledge that failure could trigger a nuclear war.







STONY MAN

Whenever duty calls, America’s most elite black ops and cyber tech group is ready to deploy. Stony Man Farm acts under orders from the President to save innocent lives by taking down one terrorist at a time—even if it means losing their own lives in the process.

WAR FOR SALE

Tensions erupt between Pakistan and India after Pakistani soldiers are found massacred in an Indian village, along with the body of an American—a businessman who had no reason to be there. Phoenix Force must stop ongoing battles in the area—skirmishes led by two rogue generals. When Able Team investigates the mining company that employed the dead American, the men are attacked by a group of mercenaries. With relations between Pakistan and India hanging in the balance, the Stony Man teams are faced with daunting missions…and the knowledge that failure could trigger a nuclear war.


POL CHECKED HIS M4, DREW THREE QUICK BREATHS AND BROKE COVER

“Go, go, go!” shouted Lyons.

The three men of Able Team charged the cafeteria, their guns at their shoulders, gliding in a combat crouch that gave each of them a stable firing platform. Their weapons barked; there were still a few men left mobile after the Osprey’s attack. Most of those in the cafeteria now, however, were dead or dying. A few moaned. The floor of the cafeteria was awash in blood.

“Clear,” Lyons said.

“Clear,” Gadgets responded. He turned to Pol and his eyes widened. “Pol! Your six!”

Pol spun around, dropping low, trying to get himself out of the line of fire. The man drawing down on him held an AR15. Pol snapped off a shot that punched through the man’s thigh, toppling him, causing him to lose his grip on his weapon.

“Secure that guy!” Lyons ordered.

Pol was already on the move. He dashed to the wounded shooter, kicked the man’s gun away and put the barrel of his own M4 under the man’s chin.

“Do not move,” he ordered. “Do not attempt to take any hostile action or I will blow your brains all over this floor.”


Triplecross

Don Pendleton







Contents

PROLOGUE (#u42a79037-9d92-584c-ab39-8e939961a1bf)

CHAPTER ONE (#uaf73ce01-cc65-581c-aed2-968e1cc37536)

CHAPTER TWO (#u649a68f4-f7b7-5c6f-8d38-3cd6e860dff3)

CHAPTER THREE (#ufa424338-8f2c-596a-a6a5-d037602b702e)

CHAPTER FOUR (#u204ef767-3b67-505f-b70e-107aafd2bc1c)

CHAPTER FIVE (#u399f83e6-ce3b-5775-b5a2-ad5059a5655c)

CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)

EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)


PROLOGUE

Siachen Glacier Region, Pakistan

Hakim Janwari shivered under his winter-camouflage BDUs. He pulled his face wrap tighter, flexing his fingers within his gloves, worried about the frostbite that crept, almost like a disease, from man to man. So many had been affected. He personally knew five men who had lost entire fingers. Janwari lived in constant fear of coming home to his wife less whole than when he had left her.

If he came home at all.

He adjusted his goggles. Already they were encrusted with ice again, making it difficult for him to see. His legs felt leaden as he struggled to raise his boots, to take step after step, to march onward toward a goal he no longer understood on a field of battle he did not care about.

Ahead and to his left, barely visible through the wind-driven snow, a Chinese-built Type 88 main battle tank struggled to move forward. The tanks simply were not built for this terrain. The cold and the driving snow created a deadly, icy paralysis in man and machine alike. The cold was killing both, slowly but surely, here at the top of the world.

The Siachen Glacier region was called the world’s highest battleground for a reason. Pakistan and its hated enemy, India, had fought each other here intermittently for more than three decades. What they were fighting to achieve, Janwari could no longer say. What his government thought it earned by sending men and weapons of war into this frozen hell, Janwari was afraid to ask.

He could feel his legs beginning to grow warm. That was a bad sign. Cold was the only constant here. The illusion of warmth signified his body trying to compensate. It was the first sign that it—that he was succumbing to the dreaded cold. He knew the process well by now.

From within his parka he struggled to remove the rugged GPS unit. The aluminum housing of the electronic box made him wince even through his gloves. It was so cold. Everything was so very cold.

He was forced to scrape another layer of frost from his goggles before he could read the GPS unit. What it would tell him, he already knew very well. He and the men of his unit were just beyond the Line of Control, sometimes called the Berlin Wall of Asia, somewhere between the Karakoram and Ladakh ranges and below Karakoram Pass. They had not yet crossed over into Shaksam Valley.

The Line of Control was the demarcation between territory held by India and territory held by Pakistan in what was once Jammu and Kashmir. This landlocked “princely state” had once boasted a Maharaja, whose pretensions of neutrality had not lasted much longer than the 1947 Indian Independence Act. This was when British India was officially divided into Pakistan and India.

Torn by localized rebellions and plunged into armed conflict, the region had been ripped apart from within by insurgents who favored either India or Pakistan. The legacy of Kashmir was one of violence. Recently, an uneasy ceasefire had been called, and held, for some months. But that was over now.

The coordinates finally resolved. The GPS device was sluggish. It was difficult to acquire a clean line of sight to the satellites overhead through this weather. Janwari supposed he should be grateful he was able to take the reading at all.

He was not. The coordinates were not nearly different enough. They should have covered three times as much ground during the waking hours. They had made very poor distance in this weather. Janwari had begged his superiors by radio to allow the men to camp, to seek the relative warmth of their storm shelters, while waiting out the worst of the current weather. But the higher-ups would not listen. They had told him to carry on, to follow his orders.

He did as he was told.

From the pouch on his waist he took one of the last of his flares. He was not sure what they would do tomorrow, when the last flare was used. Perhaps he would be reduced to firing in the air and hoping his men could hear the shot over the howling wind. At the moment he was too cold to care. He popped the cap on the flare, held the tube away from his body and pulled the release cord to fire the flare. He could not smell the acrid fumes through the snowstorm.

The glowing green star that floated to the ground on a silken parachute was almost beautiful. He watched the flare descend, willing the ache in his shoulders to go away, knowing that if he was not within shelter soon, the cold would take the ache and everything else readily enough. Too readily he understood the siren song of the deathly cold. It sang to a man about the end of pain. It told a man everything would finally be all right. It was the easiest thing to do...simply let go, close your eyes and let the cold take you.

Janwari forced himself to open his eyes wide. No. He would not give in. He would not let the glacier have him. He would not die in these frozen mountains.

To his left, Hooth and Gola began setting up the shelter. Simple as it was, it was harder in the searing cold. Still, they were practiced. Their lives had revolved around this ritual for the past five days, plodding through pointless “patrols” and then setting up the portable shelter every night. Often Janwari helped them, although strictly speaking, they were his subordinates and he was not required to do so. This night he could not bring himself to move from the spot on which he was now rooted. He waited as they erected the shelter, then followed when they beckoned him to enter.

Once inside, Hooth switched on the LED lantern. It was feeble, both from cold and because the batteries were not fully charged. The lantern was solar with a crank backup. Later, after they ate, they would draw lots to see who cranked it this evening. There was never enough time, before sleep beckoned, to charge the lantern fully.

Gratefully, Janwari took off his pack and let it fall to the floor of the shelter. From his shoulder he took the Type 56 Kalashnikov-pattern assault rifle and placed it next to the pack. Many Pakistani troops were issued the excellent Heckler & Koch G-3 battle rifle. There weren’t enough to go around, particularly here. He and his men were forced to make do with the Chinese-produced AK clone. Most of these, like Janwari’s, were wrapped in strips of white adhesive-backed cloth tape. The tape on Janwari’s weapon was dirty and worn.

As Janwari took out his bedroll and began to spread it across his third of the shelter, Gola was already lighting a can of Sterno. The three men huddled around the wisp of flame, spreading their parkas to catch the scant heat. Gola began working on a can of soup with his pocketknife, sawing away at the top of the can. If Janwari counted correctly, this was the last of the smuggled cans Gola had crammed into his pack before they’d left their base camp near Rawalpindi.

“‘The land is so barren,’” Hooth said.

“‘The passes so high,’” Gola continued.

“‘Only best friends and worse enemies come by,’” Janwari recited, finishing the traditional quote about the inhospitable land in which they found themselves. Gola smiled as he shifted the can of soup atop the Sterno can. The heat had to be burning his fingers, at this point, but he did not seem to mind. It was also possible he could not feel his digits. Janwari made a mental note to check Gola for frostbite.

“It is not much of a ceasefire,” Hooth said. “Walking in circles in the cold.”

“You have said the same thing every night for five days,” Gola said. He stirred the soup with the blade of his pocketknife. “I believe we all know your opinion on the subject by now.”

“It is better than fighting,” Janwari said. “But not much.”

“And you have said the same, as well,” Gola accused.

“Shall I complain that the soup has been the same for five days?” Janwari asked. He allowed himself a smile as he pried his frosted goggles from his stiff, frozen head wrap.

“We should all be grateful,” Hooth said. “I suppose. But this marching to nothing...”

“Crawling to nothing,” Gola corrected.

Snow pelted the shelter. They would be forced to unfold their shovels and dig out of the snow in the morning.

“Yes,” Hooth said. “Crawling to nothing.” He looked to Janwari. “When will the patrol be released? When can we return to base?”

“I cannot get anyone at Command to acknowledge my requests,” Janwari said. “Always it is the same. ‘Return to your scheduled patrol route. Follow your orders. Stop asking questions.’”

“They say this?” Hooth asked.

“They imply this,” Janwari said. “One learns to read what is meant and not what is said.”

“It is ready,” Gola said. “The soup is as warm as I can make it.” As cold as it was here, that meant simply tepid by normal standards. But Janwari’s mouth watered at the thought of a meal that was not rock-hard, frozen protein bars or the unappealing rations issued by his military. From his pack he took his canteen cup. Gola and Hooth were already prepared with their own.

Outside the shelter the howling winds were growing even stronger. The fabric of the little tent was whipped to and fro. Hooth shook a fist at the walls, then rubbed his hands together.

Gola poured the soup expertly. He divided the amber liquid among their cups. Janwari gulped his, knowing that in only minutes the soup would lose what little warmth it contained. Gola sipped his more deliberately, while Hooth followed Janwari’s example.

“I am thinking of a place,” Gola said.

“No, not this again,” Janwari replied. He put a hand to his ear. “Did you hear that?”

“I will play,” Hooth said. To Janwari, he said, “The storm is very bad. The worst yet. We will be beaten half to death with balls of ice before this is over.” Turning back to Gola, he spread his hands as if describing a scene. “Is it a warm place, Gola, full of beautiful women in indecent bathing suits? A place where they bring you tropical drinks with umbrellas in them?”

“Yes,” Gola said. He frowned. “You should not have guessed it so quickly.”

“Why not?” Hooth asked. “You think of the same place every time. As do we all, I think.”

“Someplace warm,” Gola said wistfully.

“Someplace full of pretty girls,” Hooth reminded him.

“My wife would be jealous,” Janwari noted. “And she is already beautiful. I wish only to get home to her. I do not begrudge either of you your dancing girls and your beaches.”

“They are not dancing girls,” Gola corrected. “Merely women in very tiny bathing suits. If they dance, it is simply an added benefit.”

“Have you leave coming?” Hooth asked. “I have some.”

A surge of storm wind made the shelter vibrate around them.

“Neither as soon nor as long as I would like,” said Gola, shaking his head. “Were it up to me, I would—”

“You would what?” Hooth said.

Janwari looked to his subordinate. Gola had stopped and now stared, wide-eyed, at the dwindling flame of the Sterno can. “Gola?” Janwari asked. “What is it?”

Gola shook his head, slowly. He put his hand over his stomach.

Cold wind whipped through the tent, causing the cooking flame to gutter. Janwari cursed and reached for the flap of the shelter. “It has come unsealed again, like before. Help me with this before we are turned to icicles.” On his knees in the tent, he maneuvered past Gola.

The chill wind issued from a tiny circular hole in the tent. The hole was at chest level to the kneeling men within.

Janwari’s eyes widened in horror. He looked to Gola. Gola took his hand away from his stomach.

Gola’s palm was covered in blood.

As the other two men watched, crimson spread across the white winter camouflage of Gola’s uniform. He pitched forward into the can of Sterno, spilling the rest of his soup. The entry wound in his back was small, almost unnoticeable.

“Get down!” Janwari screamed.

Hooth was too late. As Janwari flattened himself to the floor of the tent, automatic gunfire pierced the tent from two directions, shredding the fabric, spraying Hooth’s blood across Gola’s corpse. The thick, warm liquid specked Janwari’s face and back and as he waited for the fusillade to subside.

Snow blew through the tattered shelter freely now. Janwari crawled to Hooth’s body and put two fingers against the man’s neck. There was no sign of life. Gola, too, was dead. Janwari crawled to his pack, ripped it open and removed the heavy radio.

There was a bullet hole in its face.

Janwari cursed his poor fortune. Scrambling to drag on his goggles, he threw his face wrap haphazardly around him and took up his Type 56 assault rifle. Then he was plunging outside into the heavy snow, into the driving wind, as another barrage of automatic gunfire raked the shelter behind him. Gola and Hooth were each ripped from boots to skull by the merciless bullets. If they had not been dead already, they surely could not have survived that.

It took Janwari precious seconds to realize he had lost his bearings in the snowstorm. What could he do? He had no means to call for help, no idea who was attacking and no idea from which direction the invaders had come. He saw only the shelter beginning already to blow away in pieces, and the bloody corpses of the two men whom he had counted as friends.

“Damn you!” Janwari screamed into the wind. “Damn you all!”

Only when he brought up his Type 56, felt the cold bite of the metal and wood of the rifle on his skin, did he realize he had forgotten his gloves. Screaming, he brought the rifle to his shoulder anyway, bracing himself on one knee as he sought targets in the snow-swept darkness.

Suddenly the night was bright with harsh, green-white luminescence. The flares that drifted down from the sky now were not those of Janwari’s unit. These were more powerful, clustered for effect. They were meant to reveal, not to signal. They were meant to cast powerful light on what was now a killing field.

Janwari braced himself. He had not noticed the first salvo of flares, not within the circle of light in his shelter, but that had to be why the enemy gunfire had died down. They had fired flares, done their horrible work while the flares came down, then waited to fire another salvo. That meant the killing would resume any moment—

There! The yellow-orange blossoms of muzzle-flashes were unmistakable in the partial darkness. In the wind and the snow he could not hear the blasts. The icy gales of the glacier swallowed the sounds of war, smothering any hope he had of warning the others. He could see the other shelters dotting the camp area. Several of these had been shot apart. The snow around them was dark red with blood. Janwari’s heart leaped into his throat at the sight of it.

Feeling the ache of the cold radiate from the grip of his rifle through his palm and into his wrist, he triggered the Type 56, squeezing one shot at a time from the weapon. He could not see what he was aiming at; he could see only the muzzle-flashes of the enemy guns. He hoped his rounds would have some effect.

To his relief he saw several more blooms of fire from among the bloodied shelters. More of his unit were responding, were returning fire, were fighting for their lives. He took a step forward in snow that was now up to his calves. His legs were so warm he could barely feel them. He did not care.

A hot shell from his Type 56 struck him in the face and snaked down inside his parka. He felt the sting on his neck. In his mind he was counting; soon he would be out of ammunition. When his rifle ran empty he would have only the well-worn Tokarev pistol in the flap holster on his belt. The weapon was buried deep under his parka in attempt to keep it from freezing up completely.

Think, he told himself. What will you do when you run out of ammo? What is your plan?

Janwari forced himself to put one foot in front of the other, plowing his way through the snow like an icebreaker in frozen seas. Slowly, dimly, he became aware of disturbances in the snow around him. Pocks in the snow cover were left as fist-size mounds were churned up all around him.

He was taking fire.

He threw himself into the snow, desperate for something to use as cover, anything behind which to hide. The white expanse felt like razor blades where it touched the exposed skin of his face. He raised his rifle and pulled the trigger back, spraying out the last of his magazine, knowing the gesture was futile.

Through the wind he heard the engine of the Type 88. The tank was moving, however slowly, through the storm. He changed course for it, letting his rifle fall. It was too heavy and he had no ammunition. His Tokarev would have to do.

Numbed fingers found the butt of the pistol. The metal of the weapon, even taken from under his parka, should have made him scream from the cold. He didn’t feel it. His left hand felt like deadweight as he struggled to drag back the slide of the pistol.

He stumbled and fell. When he finally managed to struggle to his feet, he was completely disoriented. Where was the tank? He did not know why he hadn’t thought of it before. The tank had a radio unit he could use. He just needed to get to it. It was possible the tank commander had already used it, but he couldn’t be sure.

The light from the flares above began to die. The flares were descending into the snow, where they were extinguished. In the darkness, he could see more weapons discharges. But now he could not remember in which direction the enemy lay. He pointed his pistol into the screaming winds but didn’t fire it. In the darkness everything was shadows.

One of the shadows moved.

He heard the rumble of the tank’s bogeys, heard the rattle of its poorly maintained engine. Crawling now, he forced himself to stand, plunging forward, staggering, falling.

He collided with the tank.

The armor was slick with ice. He smelled smoke and something worse, something oily and vile. As he tore flesh from his frozen hands scrambling up the side of the war machine, he realized that black smoke was pouring from a crater in its flank. It had been hit with an antiarmor weapon of some kind. He thought the Type 88 was supposed to have reactive explosive plates...but he wasn’t sure. It didn’t matter. He found the hatch and threw it open.

The tank commander was dead. Janwari didn’t climb inside as much as fall to the floor of the chamber within. The commander was the only body there; the rest of his crew had not made it inside. There was a great deal of blood pooled around the dead man. He had been shot, probably more than once, before reaching the relative safety of the machine.

The enemy could fire another antitank missile at any moment. The tank was an obvious target. Janwari thought about taking control of the turret, trying to swing it around to bring the Type 88’s main gun into play. He knew the basic procedure. Every man in the unit did.

Fighting was not as important as alerting the rest of the military to what was taking place here. He reached for the radio, which was intact and, as far as he could tell, powered and ready.

His hand struck the console.

Janwari looked down at his arms. Only then did he realize that he couldn’t feel his hands, couldn’t feel his fingers. He tried to grip the console and could not. He kept striking it instead, his hand a block of frozen, swollen meat that would not obey his mind’s commands. No! He had waited too long in the cold without gloves. He could not manage the dexterity required to switch on the radio.

The hatch above him opened again.

Janwari looked up. The circle of sky above was once more illuminated in the harsh green glow of the enemy’s flares. He could see faces above him, could see the uniforms his enemy wore. They looked down at him, dispassionate, almost bored.

They wore the uniform of the Indian army.

Janwari wanted to raise his Tokarev and fire at them, but his pistol was gone. His hand was a frozen, useless claw. He screamed at the soldiers staring at him.

One of the Indian men dropped a grenade inside the tank and threw the hatch closed.

The grenade rolled across the deck near Janwari’s feet. He tried to grab it, tried to scoop it up, thought of carrying it back to the hatch, forcing the hatch open and throwing the deadly bomb back toward the Indians.

But of course he could not. His hands wouldn’t work. He had just long enough to wonder how long the fuse on the grenade might last.

He had time to think the words, I don’t want to die. Not like this.

And then he was finally warm, for just a moment, before he was nothing ever again.


CHAPTER ONE

Indian-held Kashmir

“Does this place have a name?” Calvin James asked.

David McCarter, the lean, fox-faced Briton and former SAS operator who was leader of Phoenix Force, gulped the last of a can of Coca-Cola, crushed it and tossed the can behind the passenger seat of the MRAP. From the driver’s seat, James shot him a disapproving look, which McCarter met with a measured stare. Finally the lanky black man from Chicago’s South Side allowed a wide grin to split his features.

“According to the chart,” Rafael Encizo said from the rear of the MRAP, “it doesn’t. This village isn’t even supposed to be here.” He checked his satellite phone again, which was patched to a feed from thermal imaging satellites overhead. The delay was considerable, but what the stocky Cuban-born guerrilla fighter was observing was essentially a real-time top-down image of the target coordinates. “I’m showing a huge drop-off near one corner of the village, though. Probably part of the natural mountain formation.”

“Got it,” James said. “I’ll try not to drive us over any edges.”

Phoenix Force, the covert international counterterrorist team headquartered at the top-secret Stony Man Farm, had split its five members between the Farm’s two prototype MRAP vehicles.

The MRAPs had been modified and customized by John “Cowboy” Kissinger, the Farm’s Armorer. Each Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle was a four-wheel-drive armored personnel carrier with a V-shaped chassis designed to deflect explosives. The armor offered protection against 7.62 mm armor-piercing rounds and even rocket-propelled grenades. The body of the MRAP was, in fact, touted as “blast proof,” although McCarter had his doubts about that.

Powered by Caterpillar C-7 diesel engines coupled to Allison automatic transmissions, the heavy vehicles boasted 330 horsepower. They had both driver’s-side and passenger’s-side doors, as well as rear hatches for the troop compartment, while a roof hatch allowed access to the armored machine gun mount on the roof. McCarter’s MRAP sported a 7.62 mm M-240 medium machine gun, while the vehicle behind it mounted a MK-19 automatic 40 mm grenade launcher.

In the rear vehicle were the stolid, soft-spoken Canadian giant, Gary Manning—Phoenix Force’s burly demolitions expert, once a member of an antiterror squad of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police—and T. J. Hawkins, the youngest member of the team. Hawkins had been both a paratrooper and an Army Ranger before he was recruited to Phoenix Force.

McCarter took his own secure satellite phone from his web gear and reviewed the mission data once more. It contained, among other things, a file that listed a series of coordinates. These were all sites at which the Pakistani and Indian military forces had come into conflict, despite a ceasefire that was supposed to portend peace and prosperity for the region. That had been the general idea, anyway. McCarter had about as much faith in political rot such as that as he did in the supposedly bomb-proof hull of the vehicle in which he sat. Promises were nice, but as an American president had once said, “Trust, but verify.”

A pair of thermal imaging satellites over this part of the world had been “borrowed” by Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman and the Stony Man cybernetics team, re-tasked to monitor the upper Kashmir region and its bordering territory. It was through those satellites that the Farm was tracing the pattern of military skirmishes between the neighboring countries. Yet both nations claimed it was the other country doing the initiating. Neither would admit to having taken part voluntarily.

The President was worried about the stability of the region. Responsibility for shoring that up fell to Phoenix Force.

The assignment was simple enough. Phoenix was being sent in as a spoiler. They were to find an area, or areas, of localized Pakistani-Indian conflict, then neutralize that conflict to the best of their ability. McCarter had no illusions about what that meant. Apparently some UN peacekeeping troops had already been sent in, per a resolution from the United Nations itself, in an attempt to enforce the ceasefire. A good deal of power players in the international community, McCarter gathered, had been involved in getting the Indians and the Pakistanis to stop shooting at each other over Kashmir. The “world community”—a term that had always struck McCarter as ridiculous—had decided to send in several units’ worth of joint peacekeeping forces.

The soldiers had never returned. Not alive, anyway.

Whether by the Indians, the Pakistanis, or caught between the cross fire of the two, the UN troops had been ground to pieces in this cold, mountainous battleground. Now Phoenix Force, outnumbered by an order of magnitude, was being sent in to meddle in the same nasty business. There would be no friendlies on the field. The troops of both India and Pakistan could be expected to shoot to kill, to ask any questions after the fact. McCarter was not going to let Phoenix Force be taken out so easily. That’s why they were traveling in the armored MRAPs and loaded for bear where their personal weapons were concerned.

Each man of Phoenix Force was equipped with his usual pack and kit, including an earbud transceiver connecting him, through his satellite smartphone, to the other team members. Each man also had a modular Tavor assault rifle with a 40 mm grenade launcher under the barrel. The GTAR-21 rifles were equipped with quick-acquisition reflex sights and 30-round magazines. Their cyclic rates had been adjusted by Cowboy Kissinger, who rated them at roughly 800 rounds per minute.

In addition to the Tavors, each Phoenix Force team member had been issued a Ka-Bar-style full-size, fixed-blade combat knife and a Glock 19 handgun, although McCarter had insisted on a Browning Hi-Power. He and Kissinger had argued about it for quite some time, in fact, as Kissinger rightly argued for standardization among team members. McCarter simply could not abide any other pistol. He fought best and hit most accurately with the Hi-Power. He refused to compromise unless absolutely necessary.

Gary Manning, as the largest member of the team, had also opted to carry a heavy RPG-7 launcher and a supply of HEAT, or High Explosive Anti-Tank, warheads. These would provide them with additional range and better penetration when attacking enemy APCs. Anything more than an armored personnel carrier, such as a tank, would generally be too well armored for the RPG to touch, but they would, as one of McCarter’s old SAS chums had been fond of saying, “burn that bridge when they came to it.” The warping of the old turn of phrase was deliberate. McCarter always pictured running across a flaming bridge with gunfire at his back.

Certainly his life with Phoenix Force was no less “interesting” than that.

“Interesting” indeed described the situation in which Phoenix found itself. It would be caught between two hostile forces, neither of which would hesitate to shoot the team down and leave their bodies in a mass grave. At the same time, McCarter had spent enough time in the business of war to know that the troops against which Phoenix would be arrayed were just mortal men. Some would be decent human beings. Others would be less so. That was the hell of war, and the reason that no man took up arms unless he had to. McCarter would take no pleasure in taking out Pakistani or Indian troops in putting out this brushfire conflict, but he would do it because it was necessary.

Then, too, there was the fact that the UN peacekeepers had been slaughtered. It would probably be impossible to verify who was most responsible for that, but if McCarter had to guess, his combat instincts told him both sides had probably factored into it. While many people made fun of UN peacekeeping troops and their baby-blue berets and helmets, McCarter had served with joint task forces before. He knew that, just as those on the enemy side of the battle lines, the forces making up a UN team were only as good, or as bad, as the soldiers pulled into service to do the job.

He’d seen the rosters of the dead, thanks to the Farm’s excellent intelligence-gathering. Good men and even a few women had died as part of that peacekeeping force. The most likely scenario was that they had been caught in a cross fire between the Indians and Pakistanis. That would have resulted in the kind of carnage documented by the search-and-rescue team the UN had sent in.

Precisely where Phoenix Force was headed.

Where previous soldiers had failed, Phoenix Force would succeed. It was what they did. It was how they lived. But McCarter would not be glad to put down the rabid dogs that would get in their way. It was a necessary service, one that had to occur. But a man took no pleasure in killing rats that carried disease. He simply eliminated the rats because they were dangerous.

This was the most complicated part of Phoenix Force’s rules of engagement. Technically an attack on forces fielded by India or Pakistan was an act of war. But both nations had repeatedly claimed they were not tasking armed forces to engage in conflict in the region. Somebody was lying or everybody was lying, but “the forms had to be obeyed,” as Brognola was fond of saying. Everybody had to play the game as if they believed the other bloke was telling the truth. The absurdity of it made McCarter want to grind his teeth.

Calvin James brought the MRAP to a halt. Manning, in the rear vehicle, did the same. Through the viewports the men of Phoenix Force surveyed the small village ahead, which lay across a winding, barely visible road of dirt and rocks.

“Comm check,” McCarter said. In his ear, the voices of the other teammates sounded as they counted off. There was the slightest of delays when James and Encizo spoke compared to the transmission of their voices in McCarter’s earbud. That was the satellite delay. It was very slight, but worth understanding. Timing was everything in combat. No, McCarter corrected himself. Timing and flexibility.

Enough wool-gathering, he told himself. It was time to put things in motion.

“All right, mates, let’s roll forward. Make for the center of the village. Gary, follow us and break right when we reach the halfway to center point. Circle around on the right flank and keep that MK-19 warm.”

“Roger,” Manning said.

“Put it to the floor, Calvin.”

“Oh yeah,” Calvin James crowed, shifting the MRAP into drive. The powerful vehicle lurched forward, its heavy run-flat tires kicking up plumes of dust that matched those of the following truck.

“Ten o’clock,” Encizo said, watching through his port. “I’ve got two—no, three running from structure to structure. I saw at least one slung rifle, probably an AK.”

“Copy,” James acknowledged.

“Break left and follow him, Calvin,” McCarter directed. “Gary, proceed as we discussed. We’ll meet up back at the center of the village.”

“Affirmative,” Manning said.

The “structures” on either side, as the MRAP threaded its way down a side passage between the buildings, were a curious mixture of stone and “shanty modern” construction. Anything that could be employed to bolster the dwellings against the cold and wind had been done. There were sheets of corrugated metal and even layers of tarps lashed with wire. Windows, if there were any, were shuttered slits carved in the exteriors. No structure was more than a single-story tall. Many buildings, which McCarter guessed to be the older ones, exhibited less haphazard construction from stones and mortar. As they drove deeper into the village, the stone buildings began to predominate, which made sense.

Something struck the hull of the MRAP.

“What was that?” Encizo demanded. “It was the right rear panel. Was that a rock?”

“My money’s on gunshot,” James stated.

“I think it was a rock,” Encizo argued.

More impacts struck the hull, and this time there was no mistaking the hollow metallic chatter of Kalashnikov-pattern assault rifles behind the fusillade. Encizo grinned as James shot him a glance and held out his hand, rubbing his fingers against his thumb.

“Where’s my money?” James asked.

“We didn’t get to that,” Encizo said.

“Technicalities, technicalities,” James said. He urged the MRAP faster. “Which way you want to go, David?”

“Circle this stone hut on our right,” McCarter directed. “Rafe, get on the phone and have the Farm patch us through to the Pakistanis and the Indians. Give them our coordinates and ask them if they’ve got forces here.”

“We’re really going to play this game?” Encizo asked.

“Just think of them as very fast rocks until we hear otherwise,” said McCarter.

“Whoa!” James shouted. “Contact front!”

The armored personnel carrier that rolled across their path bore the crossed-swords insignia of the Indian army. A machine gun turret at the top of the APC was wheeling in their direction.

“Back, back, swing left!” McCarter shouted.

“Aye-firmative,” Calvin said. He hit the gas and the MRAP hustled back in a flurry of gravel and dirt plumes.

“One, this is Two,” Manning said through the transceiver link. “We are taking heavy small-arms fire. Elements of the Pakistani military are coming up on our flank. I saw a tank with a green insignia. Swords under a crescent moon.”

“That’s Pakistan, all right,” said McCarter. He looked back to Encizo. “Got that, Rafe? It’s a party and everybody’s invited.”

“India says they don’t have any units at these coordinates,” Encizo reported. “No word from the Pakistanis yet.”

The MRAP shook as an explosion nearby kicked up dirt and debris.

“That’s a grenade launcher,” Encizo noted.

“Keep her moving, mate,” said McCarter. “Stay mobile. Keep the speed on until we get confirmation.”

“David, we are moving in your direction,” Manning reported. “Coming up on your four o’clock. They’re herding us your way and we need to respond with force.”

“That is a no-go. Repeat, a no-go,” McCarter declared. “Two, use of force is not yet authorized.”

“Understood,” said Manning. “But if we don’t get word soon we may be overwhelmed. Sooner or later they’re going to hit us with something our armor can’t take—”

Whatever else Manning said was lost in the noise and vibration of McCarter’s MRAP. They were taking machine-gun fire now, and nothing of too small a caliber. McCarter didn’t think it was .50-caliber BMG or anything as potent as that, but neither was it something light. The MRAP’s armor was up to the task so far, but he did not want to push it.

They had a lot of mission ahead of them before this was over.

“Bring us around,” McCarter ordered. “We need to link up with Two and then find a quiet corner.”

“Not that way!” Encizo shouted. James was starting to turn into what was a crowd of soldiers in cold-weather gear. They were using the corners of two of the older stone structures for cover.

“Back it up, back it up,” McCarter urged.

James did so. But now the passage behind them was blocked by the Indian APC. Again the MRAP shook under its turret gun.

“Rafe? Any word?”

“Coming in now,” said Encizo.

“Well?” James demanded.

“Pakistan states...” Encizo said, listening, two fingers to his earbud.

“You are killing me, mate,” McCarter said.

“No units at these coordinates,” pronounced Encizo. “I repeat, the Pakistanis disclaim any involvement in conflict at these coordinates.”

“Rafe,” said McCarter, “get up there.”

“On it!”

As James maneuvered the MRAP to get it out of the APC’s line of fire, McCarter saw the second MRAP rocket between two buildings. More slowly, what the former SAS operator swore was a Type 88 Main Battle Tank pursued Manning’s MRAP.

“Gary, on your six!” McCarter said.

The only answer was the thunder of the automatic grenade launcher atop Manning’s vehicle. Several of the stone buildings on either side of the second MRAP were damaged as the explosions from the hail of automatically released 40 mm grenades filled the unpaved street with dirt, rocks and shrapnel.

Another metallic clatter, closer this time, banged the roof of McCarter’s vehicle like a drum. That was Encizo on the machine gun in their own turret. Shooting the gap between two buildings that were little more than corrugated tin shacks, James managed to cut the angle close enough to get Encizo in a position to fire on the APC. As McCarter and James watched through their viewports, Encizo’s machine gun fire blew apart the man in the APC’s roof turret.

“Run parallel to them,” McCarter said. “Get us past and then over. We need to cut left and help Gary with that tank.”

“I have a pit,” Manning said over the transceiver link. “Very large. Looks like a garbage dump.”

“That’s just what the doctor ordered,” said McCarter. “Can you hold position near the edge long enough to lure the tank in? Get them heading at you under steam?”

“Holding,” Manning confirmed. He paused. “Incoming fire is heavy. The tank is closing on us. Bringing main turret to bear.”

“Go, Calvin,” said McCarter. “Go.”

“The APC is coming up behind us,” Encizo said through the link. “I’m trying to brush them off but their nose armor is too heavy.” The MRAP shook as Encizo milked a steady stream of rounds from the machine gun up top.

“No, that’s good,” said McCarter. “Rafe, let them come. Keep up a good show, but don’t stop them following. Gary, get ready. When we hit your tank we’re going to need you to push forward, circle around and give the APC a shove. And get ready with that automatic grenade launcher again.”

“Ready,” Manning said.

“Here we come,” said McCarter.

“Troops, contact left, contact right!” Encizo announced.

Soldiers were coming up on either side as McCarter’s MRAP closed on Manning’s with the tank between them. The tank was still rolling, perilously close to the cliff edge that Encizo had noted on the way toward the village. Its momentum was what McCarter was counting on.

Encizo traversed left, then right. His machine gun mowed down first one rank of troops, then another, tearing them apart with brutal efficiency. McCarter winced as he watched the men go down. The human body was never meant to withstand that kind of antipersonnel onslaught.

“Brace yourselves,” said James.

“Gary! Now!” McCarter shouted.

The nose of McCarter’s MRAP hit the rear of the moving tank, shoving it to the side. The Type 88 was much heavier than the MRAP, but the truck was no slouch in the mass department. It had enough power, coupled with the tank’s motion, to shove the right set of tracks over the edge of the cliff.

The tank’s weight and momentum did the rest.

The Type 88 went over the cliff.

“Calvin, punch it!” Manning said through the link.

James put his foot down. The MRAP again lurched forward, and the nose of the enemy APC shot past it with Manning’s MRAP shoving it forward. The big Canadian had finished his loop and come up behind the APC to repeat the maneuver. Both enemy vehicles were now tumbling into the pit down the cliff face.

“T.J., fire!” McCarter ordered.

Hawkins unleashed a full-automatic barrage with the MK-19, covering the pit with 40 mm grenades. The explosions that resulted turned the garbage dump into a roiling, fiery lake. The smell, even through the protection of the armored vehicles, was like nothing McCarter had experienced.

And just like that, it was over. Nothing moved in the village. The men of Phoenix Force listened, but the only sound was the crackle of the flames in the hell-pit they had created.

“Check your flanks, mates,” said McCarter. “We’ll need to patrol on foot with the MRAPs as cover. If there’s anything to be found in this village, we have to find it. And that means photographs. Whatever we can send to the Farm for analysis.”

“Roger,” came Manning’s voice.

“Got it,” said Hawkins.

Encizo climbed down into the cabin of the truck. “Loud and clear,” he said.

James turned to McCarter. “That,” he said, “is an awful stink.”

“Get used to it, boys,” McCarter warned, “because my bet is that it’s going to get worse before we’re done here.”


CHAPTER TWO

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman sat huddled with a “tactical battle mug” of his industrial-strength coffee. The milled aluminum mug, which Barbara Price had called a “flagon,” had been a gift from a special operations team with whom the Farm had partnered some time back. The funny thing about the mug was that it bore a set of milled rails, identical to those on an M-4 carbine. The men of Able Team and Phoenix Force had, off and on, teased the cybernetics genius about the best optics to mount on his coffee cup.

Kurtzman, for his part, was unruffled by their good-natured ribbing. He had been the head of the cybernetics team at the Farm since the Special Operations Group had first set up shop in the mountains of Virginia. He had not, however, always been in a wheelchair. That was the result of an attack on the Farm, one that had taken a heavy toll on the men and women of the SOG. Kurtzman, for his part, had simply gone on doing his job. He did not discuss his disability and had never once complained about it to anyone, as far as Barbara Price knew.

Price, for her part, looked through her briefing folder. The Farm’s honey-blonde, model-beautiful mission controller checked the array of switches set within the briefing room’s conference table. The flat-screen monitor at the far end of the room was already up and running. A scrambled satellite link between Washington and the Farm showed Hal Brognola’s desk in his office on the Potomac in Wonderland. The big Fed was not himself at the desk, but he would be. He had excused himself briefly to speak with some government functionary or other in the hallway. When he was done he would secure the door to his office—on which was printed, simply, Hal Brognola: Justice—and rejoin them for the briefing.

On a second monitor, this one opposite one side of the conference table, the men of Phoenix Force were assembling in front of their own portable satellite uplink. Wherever they were, it looked cold through the rear viewport of the MRAP crew compartment. David McCarter, leader of Phoenix Force, was peering into the uplink camera, looking annoyed. Calvin James and T. J. Hawkins sat to either side of him.

Encizo and Manning were not visible on screen. They were, no doubt, guarding Phoenix Force’s position in hostile territory, probably from the turrets of the armored vehicles. Price did not like to think of the five-man team operating largely without support across so much open ground, but that was the job that Phoenix Force did. She loved every one of the men on that team like older brothers.

A disturbance in the corridor outside the briefing room indicated that Able Team was on its way. It was Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz who entered first. As was often the case, he was locked in some sort of deeply philosophical argument with Rosario Blancanales, his teammate. Blancanales was known as “Pol,” short for “the Politician.” The soft-spoken, gray-haired Hispanic was, in fact, a former Black Beret, not to mention an expert in the psychology of violence and the application of role camouflage. Schwarz was, as his nickname “Gadgets” implied, Able Team’s electronics expert. His work had contributed to quite a bit of the equipment fielded by both Able and Phoenix, including the earbud transceivers that kept the teammates in constant voice contact while on missions.

Behind Blancanales and Schwarz, his huge fist wrapped around a foam cup of black coffee, was Carl “Ironman” Lyons, leader of Able Team. The big, former LAPD officer dwarfed his teammates simply through bulk. He was powerfully built and moved with all the subtlety of a bulldozer.

“I’m telling you,” Schwarz said to Blancanales, “every adventure movie where the hero gets caught and then has to fight his way out is automatically cliché. A bad guy catches a good guy, what’s he going to do? He’s going to kill him or he’s going to torture him, but either way our hero isn’t going to get free.”

“But real people have escaped terrorist captors and home invaders in real life,” Blancanales countered. “People who didn’t even have any training. In your movie the hero is always a tough guy or someone who’s ex-military. Or both.”

“Exactly my point,” Schwarz said.

“Gadgets, do you realize you say, ‘Exactly my point,’ every time you start to lose an argument?”

“Exactly my point,” Schwarz repeated.

“So a trained, albeit fictional military or law-enforcement hero can’t do what a real-life civilian can do.”

“Exactly my—”

“Here,” Blancanales said. From his pocket he took a red-dot sight. “I can’t get this to illuminate. I changed the battery and everything. I think it’s broken. Why don’t you uphold that science-whiz reputation you have and see if you can’t fix it?”

“Isn’t this Cowboy’s department?”

“Cowboy and the armory are backed up,” Blancanales said. “I know you can help.”

“Did this come off Aaron’s coffee cup?” Schwarz said, grinning.

“Don’t start,” Kurtzman grumbled. “My revenge will be swift and terrible.”

“Why’s the hero getting caught in the first place?” Lyons put in. That surprised Price, who usually thought of him as the straight man for Schwarz’s banter. Obviously, Lyons and Blancanales were a bit taken aback, as well; they both turned and eyed Lyons curiously before Schwarz managed a response.

“Well, we’ve all been...” Schwarz looked sheepish.

“What?” Lyons demanded. “Caught by the enemy?”

“You’ve got to admit that the sheer number of times that—” Blancanales began.

“If we’re all ready to start?” interrupted Hal Brognola.

The assembled Stony Man operatives turned to regard the larger-than-life satellite image of Hal Brognola. The head of the Sensitive Operations Group was chewing an unlighted cigar and looked as harried as he always did.

Not for the first time or the hundredth time, Price worried about the amount of stress the man was under. A lot of world power plays fell under Brognola’s watch. Still more of those turned into fires that the SOG was tasked to put out.

Such as the one they were about to talk about.

“You are go, Hal,” said Price. “Phoenix is live and connected.”

“Ready and waiting,” McCarter acknowledged. “We can’t sit here for too much longer, though. Our hind ends are hanging in the wind.”

“Understood,” Brognola noted. He cleared his throat. “To put it bluntly, a series of military skirmishes between what seems to be Pakistani and Indian forces are driving our intelligence assets batty. Neither government admits to deploying military assets in the region.”

“And that region is?” Lyons asked.

“In an around the disputed territory of Kashmir,” Brognola explained. “As you know, due to a rather complicated series of political maneuvers more than half a century ago, the two nations have, arguably, been in a state of low-grade war ever since. They simply do not like each other. Over the years the conflict has flared up and then died down. It’s gone on like that, hot and cold, for decades. Recently, a ceasefire was brokered by the Man and several high-profile diplomats with plenty of political capital in the United Nations. It was a big deal.”

“I remember seeing that on the news,” Schwarz said.

“What makes any lessening of tensions between Pakistan and India so important,” Brognola continued, “is the fact that the two nations are among the eight nations of the world who have, or who are believed to have, viable nuclear weapons. The United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France and China you know. Israel has long been suspected by the rest of the world to possess defensive nukes of its own, and while they won’t admit it, we wouldn’t be SOG if we didn’t know that, yes, they do. North Korea, for all its problems, has been a nuclear power since 2006.”

“If their tests aren’t hoaxes,” McCarter said. “This is a nation that builds ghost cities on its borders to make the South believe it’s not mired in poverty.”

“Nonetheless,” Brognola said, “the relatively short list underscores just how dangerous it is to have India and Pakistan rattling sabers at each other. The conflict destabilizes the entire region, but if it goes too far...”

“One of the two is going to start thinking they don’t want to wait any longer to see what their nukes can do,” Lyons finished.

“India tested their Pokhran-1, code-named ‘Smiling Buddha,’ back in ’74,” Price said. “Pakistan went nuclear later, but they’re not new to the game. They conducted a string of underground nuclear tests in ’98, as retaliation for India’s Pokhran-2, or Operation Shakti. The message on the part of both nations was clear—we’ve got the means to wipe you out. Either because of that threat or despite it, the two have skirmished with each other but never gone all the way. The President is concerned that if things keep going as they are, all-out war is assured...and we think we know why.”

“Neither India nor Pakistan will take credit for voluntarily committing forces to the border conflict,” Brognola said. “Both countries claim their own patrols have come under unprovoked attack. As you can imagine, any one of these attacks can be construed as an act of war. Our thermal imaging has mapped out a series of border conflicts between what we at first believed were elements of the Pakistani and Indian armies. We were right...and we were wrong.”

“Okay, I’m officially confused,” Blancanales protested.

“During the mop-up of a clash with what we took to be both Indian and Pakistani uniformed soldiers,” Brognola explained, “Phoenix Force took digital photographs of as many of the dead soldiers as they could. Those photographs have been analyzed at the Farm.”

“We’ve run the identities of the soldiers through our databases,” Kurtzman put in. “Many of them have no file on record. The ones that do, however, have something very specific in common.” He tapped a few buttons on the keyboard built into the conference table. A pair of images came up on the wall screen next to Brognola’s image. The two men depicted were both dark of skin and wearing military uniforms.

“The heavyset man is Ibrahim Jamali of Pakistan. His thinner, hawk-nosed counterpart is India’s Siraj Gera. Both men were or are generals in their respective armies. But there’s more.”

Kurtzman took the cue and tapped several more keys. Now a grid of images appeared. The faces were much alike and too small to be particularly memorable, but the text below each image indicated that the file photo belonged to a man found dead by Phoenix Force.

“The men you see here were all found dead at the scene of a battle in the Kashmir area. During the conflict, both sides targeted Phoenix Force. What all of the men listed here have in common is that they’re dead.”

“Naturally,” said Lyons.

“No, not after the battle,” Kurtzman said. “They were already dead.”

“Those that weren’t officially listed as dead are criminals or mercenaries,” Brognola clarified. “A few have been declared deserters. None are officially traceable to their governments.”

“Shadow companies,” Lyons concluded. “Private armies.”

“That’s right,” Brognola said. “We believe that Pakistan and India have lost control of Generals Jamali and Gera, and that both men have crafted military forces loyal to them. Most likely they’ve simply misappropriated the units over which they initially held control, and then bolstered those forces with expatriates and other mercenaries. In other words, gentlemen, they’ve gone rogue.”

“To what end?” Schwarz asked. “What are they trying to accomplish?”

“That’s the question of the day, mate,” McCarter said through the satellite link. “While we were mopping up this village we found something that makes the rest of it seem fairly tame.”

Brognola nodded. Kurtzman tapped another button and this time the image of a balding man in a suit and tie appeared on the screen.

“This is, or was, one Arthur Hughbright. He was fifty-one years old. Until two years ago he had never held a passport. He has no criminal record. He was married, with one child, a freshman at William and Mary. He has consistently filed his income taxes and, according to official government records, he grossed nearly two hundred thousand dollars last year.”

“Not exactly the dossier of an international man of adventure,” said Lyons.

“No,” said Brognola. “What Hughbright did do, however, was write a book that, in trade circles, is considered a bestseller. Specifically, he wrote an industry text on innovative geo-location methods for deep-mining techniques. When he died, he was working for a company called EarthGard, which is based right here in the United States.”

Kurtzman looked at McCarter. “Show them,” he suggested.

McCarter nodded and, next to him, Calvin James held up a suitcase. Inside the suitcase was an array of electronic equipment, none of which was recognizable to Barbara Price.

“What is that gear?” Schwarz asked, looking on with interest. “I don’t recognize it.”

“That’s the problem,” Kurtzman said. “We’re not entirely sure. Until we can courier it back here and take it apart, we’re going to have to consider it an unknown.”

“The suitcase was found with Hughbright,” McCarter added.

“This square was in Kashmir?” Lyons asked.

“He was,” Brognola confirmed. “He was also killed there, most likely by accident, and almost certainly in the cross fire created when the military contingents controlled by Gera and Jamali tried to catch Phoenix Force between them.”

“He looks like he caught shrapnel from an exploding piece of masonry,” said McCarter. “It wasn’t pretty.”

Kurtzman nodded. “We had to use a computer algorithm to reconstruct his dental work and then compare it to records of—”

“I don’t think we need to go into the details,” said Brognola, interrupting. “Let’s stipulate that the results were quite graphic. But this begs the question, what is an American mining expert doing in disputed territory on the borders of India and Pakistan? What is his connection to Gera and Jamali? And what is the equipment he was carrying with him?”

“I’m going to go out on a limb here,” Lyons began, “and guess that it had something to do with ‘innovative geo-location methods for deep-mining techniques.’”

That provoked a snicker from Schwarz.

Price shot the electronics expert a withering glare. “Yes,” she said. “The thought had occurred to us, as well.”

“EarthGard specializes in beryllium mining,” Kurtzman said. “You’ve heard of it but, if you were like me this morning, you’ve never bothered to learn what it’s for.”

“It’s a rare metal,” Schwarz said. “It has applications in the aerospace and defense industries, among others. Highly lucrative.”

“Yes,” Brognola agreed. “If EarthGard is somehow involved in finding and mining beryllium in the Kashmir region, it would explain why a piece of ground that has been the subject of a relatively cold war for the past decades is now a hotly contested proxy battlefield.”

“Meaning it was worth fighting about before,” Lyons said, “but now that there’s money in it, the area is finally worth having.”

“Precisely,” Brognola said. “Both Gera and Jamali have siphoned men and equipment from the regular armies of their respective countries. If we are interpreting the pattern of battles and the protests by both nations accurately, both men are using their rogue military elements to attack legitimate patrols fielded by India and Pakistan. This is bringing both countries to the brink of war. Initially, the Man thought—and I agreed, when we sent Phoenix to Kashmir in an attempt to put a stop to the border flare-ups—that war between India and Pakistan was the whole point. But given the discovery of Hughbright’s body, there is another theory in play.”

“Gera and Jamali are trying to carve out their own little fiefdoms,” McCarter proposed. “They’re not hitting elements of the enemy military to cause a war. They’re hitting them to get them out of the way. Both men see the other side as an obstacle to control of the region. And they know their governments aren’t really in a position to mount an effective resistance. Not with their governments bickering and the region so geographically isolated. So they’re just going to make Kashmir too costly to hold while they take it from within. But each would-be warlord is in the other’s way.”

“Yes,” Brognola confirmed. “That seems likely. It accounts for what would otherwise be simply suicidal behavior. And it’s all we have to go on until we learn more about the EarthGard angle.”

“Here it comes,” Schwarz said quietly.

“Shaddap,” Lyons muttered to him.

“Able Team is going to investigate EarthGard’s extensive network of mining sites and business offices here in the United States,” Price stated. “We’ve prepared a list of these, ranked in terms of size and relevance.”

“The cyber team has also worked up a full history on EarthGard as a business,” Kurtzman said. “We haven’t found anything dirty so far, but we’ve only peeled back a couple of layers. I’ve been working Akira and Carmen all night to see what we can learn, but it is slow going. EarthGard has a lot of very state-of-the-art security at the virtual level...which probably tells us something right there.” Akira Tokaido and Carmen Delahunt were, together with Huntington “Hunt” Wethers, the rest of the Stony Man cybernetics personnel. “We’ll keep on it,” Kurtzman promised, “and update the teams in the field as we learn anything of value.”

“What’s the outlook for local assistance?” Lyons asked. “How many toes are we going to be standing on?”

“Conceivably quite a few,” Price admitted. “Jack Grimaldi is standing by with an Osprey troop transport. He’ll take you where you need, quickly and with a minimum of bureaucracy, so you can check your target list and then move on to the next without any unnecessary entanglements.”

“Hit and git, as they say,” Blancanales quipped.

“Exactly my—” Schwarz started to say again, gesturing with the red-dot sight. A look from Lyons stopped him.

“We’ve generated a priority target list for Phoenix Force,” Price continued. “All of them are locations on the India and Pakistan borders that we calculate will be attractive to Gera and Jamali, either strategically or symbolically.”

“What’s our goal?” McCarter asked.

“You’re to chip away at the enemy until the threat posed by Gera and Jamali has been eliminated,” Brognola answered. “As long as those two are stirring up trouble in their bid to control the region, the threat of full-scale, even nuclear, war between Pakistan and India remains real. It’s our hope that you can neutralize the two generals. If you can render their forces incapable of mounting further campaigns against one another or the border, then we can step in with UN support and renegotiate the ceasefire.”

“Everybody join hands,” Lyons scoffed, “and sing ‘We Are the World.’”

“Something like that,” Brognola said, frowning. “Look, I realize we’re asking a lot of both teams. Phoenix has before it a particularly broad mission, and we have no idea just how deep the EarthGard connection may go.”

“Something about that name bothers me,” Lyons said. “It sounds like that ‘green’ hippie group we took down a while back.”

“There is evidence that EarthGard has ties to some radical environmentalist concerns,” Kurtzman said, “at least so far as their charitable and political giving goes. But nothing about the company we’ve learned to this point indicates anything along the lines of eco-terrorism or anything like that.”

“Still,” Lyons conceded cautiously, “I don’t like it. But I guess I don’t have to. We’re on it, Hal.”

“And we’re moving out,” McCarter said. “Priority target list received.”

“Good hunting, David,” said Price.

“We’ll do our best,” said the Phoenix Force leader. He nodded to James and, a moment later, the satellite image cut to static and then a blue override screen.

“Phoenix will be more or less on its own,” Brognola told those in the conference room, “beyond the reach of either India or Pakistan until they get closer to resolving the military threat in Kashmir.

“Here in Washington, I’ll be running interference for you and coordinating through Barb to make sure the locals know you have the highest federal authority. But that’s no guarantee you won’t meet with at least some resistance from ‘friendly’ authorities.”

“No worries, Hal,” Blancanales said. “We’ve played the game before. We’ll try not to break too much that you might have to pay for.”

“It isn’t you I worry about, Pol,” Brognola said. He cast a meaningful glance in Lyons’s direction. The big ex-cop chose that moment to study an imaginary spot on the ceiling, whistling tunelessly to himself.

“We’ll keep you informed, Hal,” Price said.

“Good,” Brognola said. “Good luck, Able. Keep an eye on them, Barb.” He cut the connection.

“Let’s move, boys,” Lyons said, standing. “We’ve wasted enough time on our behinds.”

“Jack will be waiting for you at the landing pad area,” Price directed. “Cowboy has prepared a full complement of gear from the armory.”

“That’s what I like to hear,” Lyons returned. He strode out of the room with Blancanales close behind. Price moved to follow, but before she did she stopped and watched Schwarz. The electronics expert looked left, looked right and then leaned over the table. He then clipped the red-dot sight to Kurtzman’s coffee mug.

“I’d check the windage and elevation on that before you fire it,” Schwarz said, grinning. He left quickly.

As she walked down the hall after the chuckling Schwarz, Price thought she heard Kurtzman talking to himself in the conference room.

“Swift and terrible,” Kurtzman muttered to himself. “Swift and terrible.”


CHAPTER THREE

Twin Forks, Utah

The black GMC Suburban waiting at the tiny airfield was a rental from a national chain that Carl Lyons recognized. He assumed that a local courier, coordinating through the Farm, had arranged for the vehicle to be left for them. In both hands he carried heavy black duffel bags, as did Schwarz and Blancanales. Each was full of weapons and ammunition, including loaded magazines, grenades and other explosives. When Lyons reached the truck he set the bags down in the gravel and began searching the nearest wheel well.

The magnetic key box was in the second well he tried. He slipped the key out of the box and put the magnetic holder back where he had found it. An electronic fob was included. He used it to unlock the truck.

“The exciting life of a covert counterterrorist,” Schwarz said as he walked up and dropped his bags.

“Be sure to drop the one with the C4 charges in it extra hard, Gadgets,” Lyons said.

“Good thing the detonators are in the other bag,” the electronic genius said without missing a beat.

“Thrill as they carry heavy things from their plane to their car!” Blancanales intoned, imitating a movie announcer.

The “plane” in this case was a Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey, on loan from Special Forces. The VTOL troop carrier was armed with a 7.62 mm GAU-17 minigun. The retractable cannon was belly-mounted and featured a video-equipped remote-control slaved to a display on Jack Grimaldi’s helmet, much like the nose-cannon setup used by Apache gunship crews. The multibarrel cannon was more or less stock, as Cowboy Kissinger referred to it, but the Stony Man armorer had worked with Schwarz to adapt the video and camera equipment so that Grimaldi could fire the minigun while piloting the Osprey.

The massive twin-rotor craft was capable of transporting far more than just the three men of Able Team and their gear, but portions of the interior cargo space had been converted to include auxiliary fuel tanks. These and the weight of the heavy multibarrel cannon in the ship’s belly reduced the aircraft’s cargo capacity considerably. It was still more than sufficient, though, to get Able Team and their weapons where the three men needed to go...and it had the range to move them around the country with speed and maneuverability.

“Everybody get your gear in order,” Lyons said, although the instructions were unnecessary. The three men of Able Team had executed enough missions together that they could work together without speaking, practically reading each other’s minds. Lyons put two fingers to the transceiver in his ear. “Comm check. Check one, check two.”

“I read you,” Grimaldi said in the Osprey. “Check-ins will be by the book, gentlemen. Your transceivers should give you enough range that I can live vicariously through your adventures while I sit here warming the pilot’s seat.”

“Roger that, Jack,” Lyons said. “Pol? Gadgets?”

“Loud and clear,” Blancanales said. “Of course, you’re also standing next to me.”

“Two by four,” Schwarz said.

“Don’t you mean five by five?”

“A two by four is what it would take to knock you down,” Schwarz said.

Lyons looked at him. “Gadgets,” he said, “I never know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“Story of my life,” Schwarz answered.

“Get in the truck, Gadgets,” Lyons said.

For this mission, Able Team was operating under full cover of their Justice Department credentials. They wore civilian clothes—Lyons, his familiar bomber jacket and jeans, Schwarz, a T-shirt and cargo pants with a windbreaker, and Blancanales, khaki slacks with a button-down shirt and a blazer. Their weapons were their usual individual kit. Each of them had a spring-assist folding combat dagger. Blancanales carried a Beretta 92-F and an M-4 carbine, while Schwarz wore a shoulder holster that carried his Beretta 93R machine pistol. Lyons, for his part, carried his trusty Colt Python in .357 Magnum. His massive Daewoo USAS-12, as well as a healthy supply of 20-round drum magazines, was one of the items weighing down his duffel bags.

Lyons drove the GMC from the airfield with Schwarz navigating. The GPS coordinates were fed to all three team members’ satellite smartphones. Gadgets simply called up a local map interface and gave the turns to Lyons. A commercial GPS unit would be a liability; the coordinates stored in such a unit could conceivably be an intelligence problem after the fact. The smartphones, by contrast, were encrypted.

They had driven for some distance, making their way to the first of the prioritized EarthGard properties, when Lyons said, simply, “Utah.”

Looking out his window before turning back to his smartphone, Schwarz said, “Yep. Utah.”

“Are you playing Furious Birds or some crap?” Lyons said, glancing at Schwarz’s phone.

Schwarz looked up. “These phones can run more than one application simultaneously—”

“You are playing,” Lyons said. “What’s it called?”

“Maniacal Blue Jays? Aggressive Waterfowl?” Blancanales queried from the backseat. “Gadgets, did you get past the brick level yet?”

“Don’t help, Pol,” Lyons said.

“Turn left, Ironman,” Schwarz said. An enormous road sign they were passing read EarthGard Beryllium, LLC, Next Left. Lyons shot Schwarz a look but said nothing. He spun the wheel over.

The team made its way up a long, winding dirt road. The curve of the road suggested a very large circle, which of course it was; the mine was at the center, and no doubt this was the primary means through which earth-moving equipment and other heavy industrial machinery was moved to and from the mine. The headquarters building was a large affair—larger, Carl Lyons thought, than it probably needed to be for an operation as relatively simple as taking ore out of the ground. He had been noticing the sentries as they’d traversed the winding dirt drive. When he saw the guards grouped outside the building’s entrance, he decided it was too much to be coincidence.

“Doesn’t it look like they have an inordinate amount of security for a mining operation in Utah?” Blancanales asked.

“I was just thinking that,” Lyons said. “Pol, grab one of the smaller duffels and tuck your M-4 and my shotgun in there. Make sure we’ve got plenty of grens and extra mags. Gadgets—”

“You’re going to make me carry it, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” said Lyons. “Yes, I am.”

A sign at the entrance to the main building parking area proclaimed EarthGard a “carbon neutral enterprise.” Lyons pulled the big Suburban into a parking slot marked Visitors: Reserved For Hybrid/Eco-Friendly Vehicles. As he climbed out of the GMC, a trio of security guards in black tactical gear was already converging on him. Blancanales came around to stand next to Lyons, while Schwarz, with the duffel bag, took up a position on the other side of the truck.

“Awfully militarized for local security,” Blancanales whispered.

“Yeah,” said Lyons. “That too.”

The three guards were large, bearded men with the experienced, self-assured look of independent contractors. Lyons did not get an “amateur security guard” or “wannabe cop” vibe from them at all; what he perceived was the type of lethal potential that men of violence, men experienced in warfare, could sometimes sense in each other. Their uniforms also put Lyons’s sixth sense for combat on alert. They were wearing a commercial brand of “tactical” clothing—including distinctive pants with slash rear pockets and cargo pouches—that were extremely popular with contractors in the sandbox abroad. The front man of the trio wore expensive, mirrored, wraparound sunglasses that cost a week’s pay for most people. The hook-and-loop nametag on his uniform shirt read Kirkpatrick.

Each man held an M-4 carbine worn on a single-point sling.

The two men behind Kirkpatrick were Conyers and Gomez. And if those were their real names, Lyons would eat his shoulder holster. While Kirkpatrick and Conyers looked the parts their names implied, Gomez was clearly Asian, not Hispanic. He was very big for an Asian man, easily massing as much as his partners did.

“These are back-breakers,” Schwarz whispered from the other side of the Suburban. “No way is the operation here legit.” The electronics expert spoke quietly enough that his partners could hear him through their earpieces, but the security team would not be able to listen in.

“Can I help you gentlemen?” Kirkpatrick asked.

“Justice Department,” Lyons said, flashing the credentials Brognola had issued to the team. “We’re investigating an international commerce issue.”

Kirkpatrick exchanged glances with Conyers. Gomez, for his part, simply stared at Lyons as if he could bore a hole through the big ex-cop with nothing but a hostile look.

“I’m going to need to see a warrant,” Kirkpatrick said.

“This identification is all the warrant I need,” said Lyons. He wasn’t really the authoritarian type; he respected the Constitution as much as the next guy. But something was off about these characters and he wasn’t going to play along. The fastest way to get them to cut to the chase was just to push their buttons until they revealed what they were after.

“No entry to unauthorized personnel,” Kirkpatrick said At the words “no entry,” Gomez and Conyers began to fan out in an attempt to flank Able Team.

I don’t like where this is going, thought Lyons, but I can’t say I’m surprised.

“Maybe you don’t understand, Slick,” Lyons said. “We’re with the Justice Department. To go higher than us you have to have a word with the President. Something’s dirty here in Denmark and we’re going to find it. Step aside.”

Kirkpatrick’s stance changed. Lyons saw it; Kirkpatrick saw that Lyons saw it. Both men knew the hammer was about to fall. The “security guard” was getting ready to bring up his M-4. Lyons couldn’t see the selector switch on the weapon, but he had to bet that all three men had their safeties off and rounds in the chambers.

“No entry,” Kirkpatrick said, his teeth clenched, “to unauthorized personnel.” He moved to take a diagonal step back, which was his attempt to get off the attacking line and bring his weapon into play. Lyons was already moving. As Kirkpatrick tried to raise his M-4, Lyons’s Python was in his fist. The snout of the big pistol came up under Kirkpatrick’s chin, below his line of vision. It was an old trick, but a good one. Kirkpatrick was already visualizing Lyons’s death, already taking up the slack in the M-4’s trigger, his expression one of triumph. That changed the moment the barrel of the Python touched the flesh under his jaw.

“Here’s my authorization.” Lyons pulled the trigger.

The top of Kirkpatrick’s head exploded. Lyons pushed the corpse away, watching it fall back as he backpedaled to the only cover available, which was the Suburban. Schwarz and Blancanales had already opened up on the other two gunmen, driving them back toward the double doors of the mining office entrance.

There was a heartbeat’s lull in the firefight as the two security guards dove inside the office. Schwarz ripped open the duffel bag. “Carl!” he called.

Lyons held out a hand. Schwarz tossed him the heavy USAS-12 automatic shotgun. He threw Blancanales’s M-4 to him and then hooked his support hand through the trigger guard of his 93-R machine pistol, using the fold-down foregrip to brace the weapon.

Schwarz and Blancanales advanced on the double doors, covering each other as they left the shelter of the Suburban. Blancanales reached out and tried the door handle, pulling his hand back quickly lest he lose it to a spray of gunfire from the other side. Nothing happened. The door was solidly locked. The walls flexed slightly, however.

“Talk about cheap construction,” Blancanales said.

“It’s a prefab trailer,” Schwarz said. “Big and modular, probably multiple trailer units interconnected. Flimsy. But the doors are held on good.”

“Let’s do this,” Lyons said. He leveled the USAS-12 at the lower set of hinges on the left side and pulled the trigger. The hinge disintegrated under the barrage of 00 Buck. It took less time to blow the second one; Lyons simply raised the barrel and rode out the recoil. He stepped aside as the door fell off.

Bullets flew from inside. The guards were shooting back, the sounds of their M-4 carbines unmistakable. It was said, and Lyons knew it to be true, that the Kalashnikov had a distinctive metallic noise. This was due in part to all the empty space under its receiver cover, which turned the AK into a metal drum when rounds were cycled through it. But the 3 AR platform and its variants also had a distinctive sound, with which Lyons and the other members of Able Team had become very familiar. If you’d heard it enough you could never forget it.

Blancanales’s M-4 had been modified and tuned by Kissinger, as had all their weapons. Blancanales squeezed several long, full-auto bursts. Among the modifications Kissinger regularly preformed was to replace the 3-round-burst mode with sustained full-automatic. The men of Able Team were more than capable of the trigger-control required to avoid wasting ammunition.

“I’d say we’ve got ample verification of hostile contact,” Schwarz noted.

“Affirmative,” Lyons said. Noting Blancanales had the most forward position of the team, he asked, “What’s it look like in there, Pol?”

Blancanales waited for a moment, timing the bursts of fire from inside the mining office. When he judged he could risk it, he moved his head just enough to expose his left eye, then whipped his skull back out of the line of fire.

“Our two friends have backup,” Blancanales related. “I count two more, all armed. No civilians. No noncombatants anywhere in range.”

“Good,” Lyons said. “Gadgets, pull two grenades. No, three.”

“Three?” Schwarz queried.

“Three,” Lyons confirmed.

“Time to blow everybody up,” Schwarz said. He reached into the duffel bag, snaked his index finger through the pins of three grenades and popped all three bombs at once. Then he tossed them in quick succession through the doorway.

“Which did you—?”

“Willie Pete,” Schwarz said quietly.

“And Hell followed with them,” Blancanales whispered.

The white-phosphorous grenades ignited. The screams from within the mining office were beyond horrible. Each grenade carried 15 ounces of white phosphorous and had a burst radius of 34 meters on open ground. Within the corridor of the mining office, detonated simultaneously as a trio, the blasts would create a fiery tunnel of molten death that bored through any human being unfortunate enough to be in the way. The cloud of smoke created was immediate and overpowering.

“Let’s move,” Lyons said. “Secondary entrance to the west.”

“Roger that,” Schwarz said.

“Affirmative,” Blancanales said.

Under cover of the pall of smoke drifting from the flaming charnel house that was now the main entrance, Able Team took up positions around the west entrance. This door, too, was secured, but the thunderous hammer blows of Lyons’s automatic 12-gauge made short work of the barrier. When the three men of Able Team finally entered the building, fire alarms were sounding through the halls. Through the distant screams, Able Team could also hear fire extinguishers being deployed. Schwarz hoped for his enemies’ sake that those extinguishers were chemical models and not simply tanks of water. Water would only scatter the hungry white phosphorous, which would burn until it no longer had oxygen to feed it.

The corridor in which Able stood was comprised of offices, each with a name on a faux brass nameplate on the door. There was no reason not to check them. Lyons signaled to his partners, pointing to the next set of doors. The team worked its way up the hall, kicking in the doors on either side as they went, with Blancanales and Schwarz working the entries and Lyons stationed in the corridor for backup.

Something creaked in the ceiling above. “I think we’re doing some serious damage to this place,” Blancanales said. “It sounds like the roof is coming apart.”

“If the fire spreads to the crawl space above the drop ceiling,” Schwarz noted, “it will move very rapidly. We need to be careful we don’t get cut off.”

“I’ll shoot us an exit, if it comes to that,” Lyons said. “I have slugs if we need them. They’ll carve through the pasteboard this place seems to be made of.”

There was still plenty of ammo left in Lyons’s 20-round drum. He scarcely felt the weight of the heavy USAS-12. The weapon was comforting in his big fists. He liked knowing that he had the option of laying down a cloud of 00 Buck that would shred almost any resistance. Each 12-gauge double-aught shell carried nine pellets, each roughly comparable to a 9mm bullet. To be on the receiving end of most of a drum of those shells was world-changing for just about anyone and anything.

The ceiling creaked again. “That’s not sounding good,” Blancanales warned.

“Keep moving,” Lyons directed. “We’re up against the clock.”

The sweep of the corridor turned up nothing. It was time to take the party closer to the main entrance, where more EarthGard personnel appeared to be active in trying to quell the chemical flames. The prefab office was arranged like a wagon wheel, with a central hub and multiple spokes. They were reaching the hub, opposite the spoke that bore the Willy Pete conflagration, when something felt wrong.

“Gadgets,” Lyons said. “Pol. Look.” He pointed. The security camera set in the wall had been turning, but now it was pointed directly at them. Lyons realized what had been nibbling at the edges of his awareness. There were automatic security cameras in every corridor, and these had been moving mindlessly back and forth when they’d first entered the building. But the cameras had been stopping and tracking them, quietly, as they’d made their way through the structure. And if they were being tracked, that meant the enemy wasn’t nearly as confused and ineffective as Able Team had been led to believe. It meant the enemy—

Lyons looked up.

“Hit the walls!” he shouted. He shoved Schwarz, who was within arm’s reach, against the far wall of the corridor, flattening himself against the fiberboard of the hallway.

Tiles from the drop ceiling rained down, followed by gunfire. The security guards, obviously coordinating with someone operating the cameras from a control area within the mining office, had crawled along above the drop ceiling until they were in position to take out Able Team.

Gunfire chewed up the cheaply carpeted floor. There were three different muzzle-flashes up there. The shooters were braced on the boards that held the ceiling tiles in place. Lyons dropped to one knee, planted the butt-stock of the USAS-12 on the floor and held back the trigger of the mighty shotgun as he walked the barrel from left to right. He emptied the drum while Schwarz and Blancanales pumped bursts of fire into the three men in the ceiling.

Three bloody corpses hit the carpet in rapid succession. One of them nearly striking Schwarz. He started and then looked more closely at the dead man.

“I’ve got another Asian here,” he said. “And over here.” He pointed to the second of the three.

“And this one,” Blancanales confirmed.

“Okay, this just got weird,” Lyons said. “No telling how many more of them could be hiding in the freaking walls or whatever. Pol, time to call in backup.”

“Good idea,” Schwarz said. “This is exactly like that movie with that woman.”

“Gadgets, so help me, if you go off on another science-fiction tangent,” Lyons began.

For Grimaldi’s benefit, Blancanales said, “G-Force, this is Able Team. Do you—”

Lyons nearly ripped the transceiver from his ear as a burst of feedback brought him to his knees. “Son of a bitch!” he roared. Blancanales and Schwarz were both wincing with pain. “What the hell was that?”

Footsteps in the corridor to their immediate left signaled that more personnel were coming up the hallway toward where they stood near the hub. The footfalls were fast, heavy and purposeful. It was the sound of troops moving in for the kill, if Lyons had to guess.

“That was active jamming,” Schwarz said. “Our friends have the means to blanket the RF and shut us out.”

“Does that mean what I think it means?” Lyons asked. “I thought these were satellite phones?”

“The transceivers are RF,” Schwarz said. “For short range.”

“I’ve got movement!” Blancanales announced. He went to one knee and braced his M-4 against the corner of the hallway junction. “Multiple contacts, coming up fast and using the offices for cover. They’re walking up two by two.”

“More over here,” Schwarz said. He pressed himself against the wall near the spoke opposite Blancanales. “Carl, they’ve got us pinned between them.”

“So we’ve got multiple hostiles inbound who have superior position,” Lyons said. “And our only means of calling in backup is hosed.”

“Until we can find the source of the jamming, yes,” Schwarz said. “We’re completely cut off.”

“How does that movie go?” Blancanales asked.

“Everybody dies,” Schwarz said.

The enemy shooters charged.


CHAPTER FOUR

Jammu, Kashmir

“That’s it,” Hawkins said, peering through a pair of compact field glasses. “The dossier on Jamali says his personal logo is the Pakistani military insignia superimposed on a red field.”

McCarter, crouched next to Hawkins on the ridge overlooking the small encampment of Jamali fighters, nodded.

“That’s how they confuse the issue,” Encizo added. “Gera does the same thing. He uses the Indian military symbology, but next to a series of black slashes to signify territory conquered. If you’re not looking for the differences you’ll just identify their rogue elements as part of the main Pakistani and Indian militaries. It’s a nasty tactic. Sure to put the two countries at each other’s throats, just as it’s done.”

“Well, not for too much longer,” McCarter vowed. “We’re going to put the hurt on them both.” He turned to Encizo. “Is the Farm still tracking that contingent of Gera’s forces?” he asked.

“Yes.” Encizo nodded. “We have real-time satellite surveillance on them. They’re a ways out yet.”

“Text Barb and ask her if we can get some generic chatter spliced into their local airspace,” McCarter directed. “Something that will make Gera’s people wonder what’s going on and give them the itch to investigate. We can do that, can’t we?”

“As long as there’s a way for Bear to reach out through the ether and touch them, yes,” Encizo said. “Why?”

“I want to draw Gera’s people here,” McCarter explained. “Give both contingents a bloody nose at the same time.”

“What happens if we overplay it?” Manning asked. He was crouched alongside James. The MRAP vehicles were parked in the shadow of a tall stone outcropping that was dusted with snow. Rather than gang-bust their way through the camp below in the vehicles, McCarter had opted for an infiltration on foot. The plan was to destroy the Jamali scouting party from within. This would give them a chance to gather any intelligence there was to be had, while putting them up close and personal with Jamali’s forces. Such men operated on the basest of animal levels. They understood fear and they understood strength. McCarter was going to put them on notice by showing them the latter and, in so doing, instilling a healthy dose of the former.

“Concern noted, mate,” McCarter said, nodding again. “And you’re right—if we don’t time this right, we end up caught between the two forces, which nobody wants or needs. So let’s be brisk in dealing with Jamali’s men. Remember—we want to make an impression.”

Manning loaded the grenade launcher of his Tavor.

“Forty mike-mike makes an impression, all right,” James said “So do those RPGs you’re lugging around.” Manning had the heavy rocket-propelled grenade launcher on his back, together with the launcher. He was large enough to be able to carry that load without it inhibiting his mobility. There weren’t a lot of men with his combat time who could boast that, even in circles as elite as the one in which Phoenix Force traveled.

“Let’s move, lads,” McCarter said.

Half crouching, gliding along from heel to toe, the men of Phoenix Force spread out and began descending, traversing the decline and closing on the scouts’ camp. Jamali’s men had a pair of Toyota trucks with machine guns mounted in the beds. They also had a canvas-covered, six-wheeled troop truck. These were parked at three points around the camp, forming a triangle, while the scouts had erected tents in the intervening space. They had set sentries, too, but not enough of them. McCarter had been watching them walk their patterns and had deliberately timed Phoenix Force’s movements to take advantage of a gap in their coverage.

“Grenades, get ready,” McCarter said softly. His words left a trail of frozen vapor that crystallized on his face. He pulled his mottled cold-weather neck wrap tighter around his face. The generic camouflage pattern of his fatigues matched that of his scarflike wrap, which was really just a big square of fabric folded over on itself several times. The gloves McCarter and the rest of the team wore were easily some of the most expensive on the market. They were durable and they insulated the hand but did not add too much bulk, allowing the soldiers of Phoenix Force to fight in cold weather without giving up too much dexterity.

Someone within the perimeter of the camp shouted an alarm. Phoenix Force had been spotted. McCarter had been counting on that. They had done what they needed to do, which was put themselves in the scouts’ midst before the enemy gunmen knew what was happening to them.

“Fire,” McCarter ordered.

His four teammates opened up with their 40 mm grenade launchers. Two grenades each struck the front of the first pickup and the rear of the second. Each vehicle was shoved aside by the explosions. The mounted machine guns were torn and bent and the vehicles themselves were rendered inoperable. The gas tank of one of the trucks exploded in a brief orange fireball.

Phoenix Force broke formation. The veteran counterterrorists ran for cover, threading their way through the tents of the scout camp, firing their Tavors in measured bursts. McCarter no longer felt the cold once the battle started. He stopped feeling anything at all except alert and awake, focused on the battle that now unfolded in front of him.

That was always how combat had been for him: a focusing of his mind to an almost painful acuity, giving him the data he needed to assess the threats before him and deal out force, mete out violence, as was required for the task at hand. Dispassionate, his trainers in the SAS had called it. It was all well and good to be angry, to let anger, even hatred, fuel your battle. But when it came to actually taking a man’s life—or the lives of a hundred men, for that matter—you had to maintain your detachment. You had to see them as what they were: targets, obstacles to be removed. That was why McCarter took no pleasure in removing even men like these, brutal though both Jamali’s and Gera’s rogue forces were reported to be.

It was simply time to remove some obstacles.

“T.J., Gary, left,” McCarter instructed. “Rafe, Calvin, right. Flank them and walk them toward the center. I’ll come straight up the middle.”

A chorus of affirmatives sounded through his transceiver. McCarter used the wreckage of one of the pickups to shield him from enemy gunfire as he took up his position. The flames from the second truck nearby were hot enough that he felt them as he waited on one knee. No time to cozy up to a campfire now, though, he reflected. The smell of gasoline was strong where the closer truck had been wrenched apart.

It was only in the movies that every vehicle was made of flashpaper and nitro, ready to blow up at the first bullet that glanced off its fuel tank. Most of the fuel in McCarter’s cover vehicle was now soaking the snow beneath the pickup’s wreckage. Even if it caught fire, it would just make McCarter’s brief stay that much more comfortable. But even without the risk that his cover would erupt into flying shrapnel without warning, he had plenty of bullets to worry about.

The Pakistanis were fielding Kalashnikovs by the truckload, from what he could see. As he watched, one of the Jamali fighters sprang up from the perforated remains of his tent with an AK in either hand. Screaming what McCarter assumed were bloodthirsty oaths, the fighter blazed away from the hip, bracing the stocks of the AKs between his body and his elbows, letting the muzzle rise carry his twin streams of bullets to hell and gone.

McCarter let his Tavor lie at the end of its single-point sling. He pulled his Browning Hi-Power, thumbed back the hammer and took careful aim.

The dual-wielding soldier was still screaming when McCarter’s carefully aimed 9 mm bullet tunneled through his forehead and blew a hole through the back of his skull.

“Close it up, lads, close it up,” McCarter said, knowing his transceiver would carry his words to the others. He stood, ready to push forward, cutting through the center of the encampment as he’d said he would.

“David,” Calvin James warned, “you’ve got a wild one headed your way.”

“Wilder than dual-wielding assault rifles?”

“On your two o’clock,” James said.

But McCarter already saw the Pakistani soldier coming. The man held what looked like a battered Makarov pistol in one hand and in the other...

“Bloody hell,” said McCarter softly. “Is that a fireman’s ax?”

The other Phoenix Force members began engaging new targets. Automatic weapons fire from the Tavors filled the air, met by diminishing return fire from the scouts.

McCarter hit the snow and rolled as bullets filled the air where he had been standing. His charging attacker emptied the Makarov and actually threw the pistol through the air as McCarter struggled to regain his feet. It was a move the Briton hadn’t seen outside a cowboy movie in a long time.

From his back in the snow, McCarter brought up the Browning and fired three times. He struck the attacking soldier in the chest, but the gunshots weren’t enough to bring the man down. The Phoenix Force leader felt the air being forced from his lungs as the Pakistani shooter collided with him, crushing his ribs and shouting in pain and anger. McCarter shoved the Hi-Power into the man’s torso and pulled the trigger, but the slide was out of battery. He smashed the weapon against the side of the Pakistani’s head and pushed with his off hand, rolling them over just as the enemy soldier tried to bring the fire ax down.

The gunfire all around the two men, cutting through the small encampment, increased in pitch. The Briton had seen some strange weapons carried into battle by men who had their idiosyncratic favorites. A fire ax was not the most unusual one he had seen, but it was a rare thing. It was also long and deadly, with a rear spike as long as his hand.

McCarter pushed until he was on top of the enemy. He smashed the Hi-Power against the man’s face once more and grabbed the ax, twisting it out of the other soldier’s grip. Only then did he see the soldier pulling a combat knife from a sheath at his waist. There was nothing else McCarter could do. If he hesitated, that knife would be in his guts and he would be a dead man.

He brought the heavy blade of the ax down on top of the enemy soldier’s head.

There was a sickening crunch. The packed snow around the two men was suddenly red with blood. McCarter bent, retrieved the Hi-Power he had been forced to release and reloaded it. Adrenaline dump coursed through him, familiar and powerful.

“David,” James said as McCarter checked his six o’clock and saw his teammates closing on his position. The camp was suddenly quiet. The gunfire had ceased. They had neutralized all the opposition.

An engine roared to life.

The covered troop truck was rolling slowly through the snow, the tires digging for traction, the vehicle picking up speed. McCarter turned, spotted the vehicle and ran for it, shoving his Hi-Power in his belt and raising his Tavor as he did so. He wanted to line up the truck for a shot, but it was already out of range.

“David,” Manning warned. “Get down.”

McCarter knew instantly what the stolid Canadian had in mind. He flattened himself into the snow, feeling the chill of the crystals against his clothing. Half a moment later the distinctive sound of a rocket-propelled grenade sailing overhead caused him to put both hands on top of his insulated skull cap.

As if that gesture would save me if the RPG wasn’t precisely on target, he had time to think.

The RPG round struck the rear of the troop truck, blew apart the canvas-covered bed and physically shoved the truck through the snow. It was a very precise shot...but the RPG had detonated against the flimsiest portion of the vehicle, short of the cab. The truck, now a pillar of orange-yellow fire from behind the cab to the rear of its troop area, continued to plow through the snow. The engine raced harder.

“I don’t believe it,” McCarter muttered to himself.

The other four members of Phoenix Force joined him, flanking him as they came up from behind. Manning began to load another RPG round, but the truck was out of range.

“We could let them go,” Encizo said.

“Chances are,” said McCarter, “when Gera’s men home in on this area, they’re going to be drawn straight to that.”

“A flaming troop truck moving through a frozen, desolate wasteland?” James asked. “Who’d notice that?”

McCarter shot James a look. He gestured. “We can go back to where we stashed the MRAPs,” he said, “or we can run them down on foot. So let’s do both. Calvin, you’re with me and Gary. Rafe, T.J., you go get the trucks and bring up the rear. They aren’t moving fast and they’re heavily damaged.”

“Not to mention glow-in-the-dark,” Encizo said.

“That, too,” McCarter said. “We’ll catch up, circle the wagons and make ready to intercept whatever diplomatic overtures Gera’s forces are likely to make.”

“On it,” Encizo said.

“You got it,” Hawkins drawled.

As the two men traced their approach back to the armored vehicles, McCarter, Manning and James set out after the burning truck, trotting through the snow at a brisk pace. McCarter was grateful for the activity. It was damned cold out here, even though the weather was calm at the moment. It felt good to put some blood back in his extremities.

“I don’t know, man,” James said as they moved. “I mean, I’m no Native American tracker or anything. We might lose them.”

Ahead of them, the trail made by the truck through the fresh coating of snow was as clear as a highway. Not that much farther ahead, the still-burning truck was impossible to miss, like the light at the end of a train tunnel.

“Somehow,” Manning said quietly, “I think we’ll manage.”

They had not gone far when the sound of the two MRAPs was audible at their backs. The troop truck was growing larger, too; they were gaining on it.

Something didn’t feel right.

“Slow it up, lads,” McCarter said quietly. The transceivers Phoenix Force wore made it possible for him to issue quiet verbal commands where he might otherwise have used hand signals. He did not have to speak loudly enough to be heard; he only had to speak loud enough that his transceiver picked it up. His amplified voice was then run through the earbuds of the other team members. The transceivers had smart algorithms for screening noise, too, which was why they did not transmit the sounds of gunfire and explosions.

“Yeah, I don’t like it,” James said. “Seems just a little too easy.”

“Let’s get down in the cold white again,” McCarter suggested. “Gary, join me down here. You’re from north of the States. It will be like home.” He looked to James. “Calvin, circle them, low and quiet. Take the right side of the truck. It’s flaming more than the left. Should obscure their vision.”

“Got it.” James loped off across the snow, silent as a panther.

“Somehow,” Manning said, going prone in the snow with his RPG at the ready and his Tavor slung, “it’s just not the same.”

McCarter judged the distance from Manning and gave himself a little more space to stay clear of the backblast from the RPG. He aimed with his Tavor and prepared to fire a targeted burst. Through the futuristic assault weapon’s sights, he watched as men began moving in and around the cab of the flaming truck, first jumping down from it, then climbing back in, then exiting again. A quick survey of the surrounding snowy ground, dotted by rocky outcroppings and scarred by natural trenches carved by the wind, showed him that James was nowhere in sight.

“They spotted something,” Manning said, speculating. “They saw Calvin but they’re not sure. They’re probably arguing among themselves. Trying to figure out if what they saw is what they saw.”

“Get ready, mate,” McCarter said. “I think they were laying for us. Using the vehicle and the fire as cover and distraction. They were hoping we’d walk right into their bullets. When we stopped, it ruined their plans.”

Manning had no response for that. The range was extreme for the RPG, and with James not visible, a shot would be unwise. But there would be no denying the explosive power of the RPG when it came time to light up their foes. McCarter spared Manning’s pack a glance. The big Canadian still had plenty of firepower for the rocket launcher, and there was more loaded in the cargo areas of the MRAPs.

The gunfire McCarter had been waiting for, the gunfire James, too, had sensed was coming, finally exploded from the truck. There were more shooters than McCarter had anticipated. He judged at least half a dozen men, possibly as many as eight. They must have been crammed pretty tightly in the cab and toward the front of the big truck, because there couldn’t have been many survivors of the blast at the back.

A muzzle-flash on their ten o’clock gave away James’s position for just an instant. Silhouetted by the guttering flames of the troop truck, a figure fell into the snow.

Score one for Calvin, thought McCarter. He waited. There was another flash, this time at eleven o’clock. James was on the move, shooting and then changing position. A second body fell from the truck.

That’s two, the Phoenix Force leader thought to himself.

McCarter waited long enough to verify that, when James’s third shot rang out, he was farther away from the vehicle, not closer. It was then that McCarter reached out and tapped Manning on the shoulder.

“Fire in the hole, Gary,” he said.

Manning pulled the trigger of the RPG. The rocket blazed from the tube, made its deceptively lazy way to the target and struck just to the rear of the cab, blowing a hole in the sheet metal and knocking the truck over on its side. A singed door, ripped free of its hinges, flew through the air and landed in the snow between the doomed vehicle and where McCarter and Manning were stationed.

“Rafe, T.J., bring it in. Put yourselves on either side of the truck and get those turrets manned. If the Farm has done its part we won’t be lonely for long. Rafe, what’s the latest satellite tracking update?”

“They’re headed to us, all right,” Encizo said through the transceiver link. “I estimate eight minutes, maybe ten, before we’ve got all the Gera we could ever want.”

“Then let’s make sure we wrap up the party here first,” said McCarter. He got to his feet and offered Manning a hand up. Given Manning’s size, the Briton had to put his weight into it.

“You’re not getting any lighter, mate,” McCarter noted.

“But you’re as charming as ever, David,” Manning retorted with a grin. “Shall we?”

“Let’s,” the Phoenix Force leader said. He brought his weapon to his shoulder and stalked toward what was left of the troop truck.

Nothing moved in the wreckage until the two men were practically on top of it. McCarter didn’t see the man who climbed out of the “top” of the truck. With the vehicle on its side, what had been the driver’s window was now the only egress through the hole where the door had been. A single Pakistani gunman, his bloody uniform bearing Jamali’s modified military crest, half jumped, half fell directly on top of McCarter.

The Briton went down under the weight of the other man. Just as quickly, he surged to his feet, carrying the smaller, lighter Pakistani with him, smashing the man against the burned-out hulk of the troop truck.

As McCarter was slamming the butt of his Tavor down on the skull of his enemy, he was aware of the gunfire around him. Manning was engaging a contact at close range, and while McCarter dealt with his own enemy, he saw James appear in his peripheral vision. The lanky James sauntered up as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Steam escaped from the neckline of his cold-weather fatigues. He had been pushing hard. His assault rifle was still in his hands.

“You all right, David?” James asked.

McCarter looked down where he knelt. The Pakistani was dead. He checked his rifle for damage, but there was none that he could perceive. He took the time to eject the magazine, check it, seat it and make sure a round was chambered. Then he stood.

“You couldn’t find something a little more unique?” James said.

“What, mate?” McCarter asked, momentarily confused.

“You know, like a garden hoe or maybe a rake.”

“What are you on about, Calvin?”

“Dude, you killed a guy with an ax a little while ago.”

It was then that McCarter realized that, no matter what else happened on this mission, he was never going to live that down.


CHAPTER FIVE

Twin Forks, Utah

Shouting a battle cry that Lyons swore was in Chinese, the gunmen began hurling themselves down the hallway, seemingly heedless of the return fire that would greet them. Lyons unleashed a new barrage from his shotgun, but for every man he cut down, another two emerged from the darkened corridor. With nowhere to go and no options, the Able Team leader decided he would have to take the only obvious exit.

“Gadgets,” he said, throwing his shotgun over his shoulder on its sling, “come here.”

Schwarz had time to turn and throw the duffel bag on his back before Lyons bent down, grabbed the slimmer man by his belt and one ankle and threw Schwarz bodily into the ceiling. The Stony Man electronics expert squawked as he was thrown, but he got the idea, grabbing on to the drop ceiling struts and clambering into the darkened crawl space.

Blancanales did not need to be prompted. He took a running start and, as Lyons held his hands low as an improvised stirrup, Blancanales didn’t so much climb as jump up into the crawl space, using the boost that Lyons gave him by standing suddenly. The two smaller men, in turn, groaned under the strain of hauling Lyons up after them.

“Go,” Lyons urged. “Go, go, go!”

Bullets chased them into the crawl space. As they pulled themselves along the metal lattice framing the drop ceiling, the shooters in the corridor below moved into position to spray upward. Raking the tiles fore and aft of Able Team’s position, they began punching holes that tracked toward the three men from front and back.

“This is bad!” Blancanales shouted.

“Gadgets!” Lyons called. “Give me CS!” He pointed toward the gap in the tiles behind them.

Schwarz nodded. From the duffel bag he produced several CS gas canisters, pulled the pins and lobbed the gas grenades through the opening. Lyons’s nose twitched as the familiar smell hit him. He had never particularly liked tear gas. Which was the point of the stuff, he supposed.

“Keep moving,” Lyons directed the other team members. “Backtrack until we get near the end of the building.”

The feedback in his ear told him his transceiver was still being jammed. Whatever was going on here at the EarthGard mine, it spoke worlds that the gunmen guarding the place had active jamming equipment readily available. What would justify so much hardware? Assuming the shooters believed Able Team represented the federal government, the guards had been awfully quick to shoot down agents whose deaths could bring a world of trouble down onto the mine.

Not that Lyons intended to die here today.

They reached a split in the crawl space where two prefabricated sections were joined. The connection formed a T-shape that led left and right. If Lyons’s bearings were correct, they were headed to the opposite end of the building, with the hub behind them. That put the left turn north and the right turn south. He took the left and glanced back over his shoulder to make sure his men were following.

“Gadgets!” he called.

Schwarz came up alongside him with Blancanales trailing. As they crawled through the ceiling, the footing beneath them became more firm. Lyons looked down and realized the drop ceiling frame had given way to plywood. The terminus of the wing they were navigating had been reinforced. There was no immediate exit.

“Ironman?” Schwarz asked.

“In a minute,” Lyons answered. He withdrew the folding combat dagger from the pocket of his jacket and snapped it open. “Dig!”

“Should have made that left turn at Albuquerque,” Schwarz muttered. He snapped open his own blade while Blancanales did likewise. All three men began stabbing at the plywood, taking large chunks out of the wood. Soon they had created a hole large enough for the three of them to slip through, although Lyons’s broad shoulders would be a tight fit.

“Down?”

“Not until they get closer,” Lyons answered. “Did you text the Farm?”

“You thought of that, too?” Schwarz asked, grinning. More seriously he said, “Yes. They’re relaying our request for air support to Jack.”

“Then we just have to try not to get dead until the air cavalry arrives,” Lyons said.

Rays of light from the fixtures below punched through the darkness of their space just short of the exit they’d created. The three men of Able Team rolled aside, pressing themselves against the sides of the upper walls. Schwarz groaned as Lyons’s bulk practically crushed him against the vertical boards of the trailer.

“Thanks, Ironman,” he gasped. “I didn’t know you cared enough to shield me from bullets.”

“Shaddap, Gadgets,” Lyons said. “And hand me a flashbang.”

Schwarz handed over the grenade. Lyons pulled the pin, released the spoon and dropped the weapon through the hole, making sure to put some spin on it to get it rolling toward the enemy. All three Able Team members closed their eyes, covered their ears and opened their mouths to equalize pressure.

The vibration of the powerful flash-bang grenade shook the plywood beneath them and set Lyons’s ears to ringing. The explosion was Able Team’s cue to act. They dropped down to floor level, Lyons first, his two teammates following.

Several uniformed guards struggled to bring their weapons up. At least one man’s ears were bleeding. All were squinting hard, trying to see through the blinding flashes that had been left in their vision. Blancanales brought his M-4 to his shoulder and snapped off two rounds into the head of each one. He moved like a machine, firing and swiveling, until all the hostiles were down.

“Let’s take this party outside,” Lyons said. He turned, knelt and emptied the drum of his USAS-12, dropped it, reloaded and repeated the process. The ringing in his ears was worse now, but not so bad that it would stop him from fighting. He threw kick after powerful kick at the ravaged wall until it gave way, creating a hole the men of Able Team could simply walk through.

Lyons’s boots hit the arid soil outside.

Behind the modular headquarters building was a mine structure of some kind. Enclosed shafts of wood radiated from the configuration. Lyons assumed there were conveyors inside. He knew little about the actual mechanics of a beryllium mining operation and, insofar as none of those specifics interfered with his mission, he didn’t care. But the shafts above were shifting now and he could hear footsteps on the wood.

“They’re on the roof line!” Lyons called. “They’re using those conveyors!”

Able Team scrambled to position themselves as much directly below the enclosed shafts above as they could. Gunfire began to rain down on them from the shooters on the roof. Lyons cursed under his breath. That was probably how they’d gotten into the drop ceiling in the first place. The firebomb entrance had driven the security forces to some roof access and they’d circled back around under cover of the building’s false ceiling.

All of that added up to something not on the level. Ignoring the fact that these guys were armed to screw all and completely okay with murdering a quantity of unknown law-enforcement agents, there was no way the sheer volume of security here was part of any legitimate operation. Lyons didn’t know how valuable beryllium was on the open market, but he had to assume you didn’t need a private army to protect it from all comers.

So what was going on here?

They were just scratching the surface of this mission and he didn’t like where they were going. He didn’t like it one bit.

It was time to take it to the bad guys. “Pol,” he said, “give me a rifle grenade into the center of the nearest walkway. My eleven o’clock.”

Schwarz reached into the duffel, found the rocket-shaped weapon and tossed it to Blancanales, who affixed the STANAG Type 22 mm rifle grenade to the flash-hider of his M-4. Then he brought the weapon up, aimed and pulled the trigger.

The grenade exploded on impact, shredding the wooden slats of the covered walkway, sending debris and dead men falling from the sky. Lyons barely moved out of the way fast enough. A corpse hit the dirt only feet from his previous position.

Renewed fire began from the remainder of the roof line. Lyons signaled his partners to follow him and then took up position behind a support leg that was nothing so much as a stacked wood-and-reinforced-concrete column. The column was just what the doctor ordered when it came to cover and concealment. The angle, for the roof gunners, was a poor one, while the concrete and wood absorbed bullets nicely.

“Cozy,” Blancanales said as the three men put their backs to the column. Gunfire ate away at the opposite side, but it was much wilder now, less focused and directed. There were shouts of outrage mixed in, too, which would be expected from any group of men, even paid mercenaries, who had lost so many comrades in so short a time.

“I swear that’s Chinese,” Blancanales said.

“There’s English mixed in, too,” Schwarz said. “One of those voices is as Southern as Southern gets. He sounds like an angry version of that big rooster from the cartoons.”

“I say, I say,” Blancanales said. “You-all are gonna pay for shootin’ my friends.”

“Yeah,” Schwarz said. “Just like that.”

“There are times when I hate both of you,” Lyons said.

“We know,” Schwarz said. “It’s part of your charm.”

The next voice they heard, however, was amplified by an electric bullhorn.

“You down there,” the bullhorn’s operator shouted. “Surrender and you will not be harmed.”

“Oh, that’s rich,” Lyons said. “I guess they top out with warning shots around three or four thousand.”

“Some people hold on to resentment,” Schwarz said.

“So help me, if you’re quoting movies at me again,” Lyons said.

“No,” Schwarz said, managing to look unconvincing. “I really cherish these firefight moments we have.”

“Hate,” Lyons said. “Seething, white-hot hate.”

“You don’t mean that,” Schwarz said.

“Oh, yeah?” Lyons started. He stopped when the metal sphere of a grenade bounced to a stop a couple of feet from his right boot.

Schwarz shoved Lyons sideways, into the column. Lyons had time to look down and recognize the threat. Schwarz, meanwhile, had shoved Lyons to “clear the road” for a massive, swing-through kick. He nailed the grenade with his toe and sent it flying from their position. It exploded, throwing clods of soil everywhere, spraying dust on Able Team.

“Thanks, Gadgets,” Lyons started to say. “I take back everything bad I just said.”

“No, don’t!” Schwarz shouted.

“Huh?” Lyons had time to say before another grenade, then another, then a third, rolled to a stop by their feet.

This time it was Lyons’s turn to act. He grabbed both Schwarz and Blancanales by their collars and shoved them forward, around the other side of the column. This put them in the line of fire from the roof above. As Lyons propelled them, his partners took the cue and ran for their lives. Bullets were biting at their heels when the three grenades blew, tearing large chunks out of the support column with their trebled destructive power.

Something cracked high above.

Lyons looked up and back as they ran, trying to find an angle at the corner of the headquarters that would make it harder for the roof gunners to track Able Team. What he saw caused him to reach out and grab Schwarz and Blancanales again.

“It jinxes us when you’re nice to me!” Schwarz blurted.

“Shaddap, Gadgets!” Lyons yelled again. He dragged his teammates against the wall of the headquarters building as the shaft behind them snapped in two, falling toward them like a redwood before an army of lumberjacks. Concrete shrapnel flew everywhere. The crash of the column was followed by the staccato pings of nails from the walkway overhead. They were being wrenched out under tension as the walkway tore itself apart on the way down. Half the walkway struck the dirt below, bringing with it whatever machinery was being housed inside. This raised a sudden sandstorm of dust and grit and billowed over the Utah war zone and forced Able Team to crouch more tightly against the building.

“You there!” came the voice from the bullhorn.





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