ENEMY VEHICLES FLARED LIKE BONFIRES IN VIOLENT CONFLAGRATIONS

Gary Manning raked the milling al Qaeda combatants with his machine gun as Hawkins methodically executed any gunman who came into his crosshairs.

Having used RPGs to disable every vehicle in the convoy, both Calvin James and Rafael Encizo traded out their rocket launchers for Soviet-era submachine guns. Moving quickly under the cover fire, David McCarter prepared to lead the assault element down the cliff face to overwhelm any resistance.

“Move! Move! Move!” McCarter barked.

As one, the three-man fire team surged forward over the lip of the steep incline. The deployed lines were flung out in front of them. They ran face-first in an Australian-style rappel down the steep incline, one hand running the guideline, the other firing their weapons from the hip using a sling over the shoulder of their firing hand to steady the muzzle.

The loose gravel gave way in miniature avalanches under their feet as they sprinted down the incline, ropes whizzing through the gloves on their hands. The light from burning vehicles cast wild shadows and threw pillars of heat up toward them. It felt as if they were running straight into the open mouth of hell.

Unified Action
Don Pendleton

STONE MAN ®

America‘S Ultra-Covert Intelligence Agency

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Unified Action

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER ONE

Michael Klaus understood how the world worked.

The world was predicated on profit. In the end all that mattered was profit, and Klaus had no patience for weaker men who refused the obvious nature of this truth.

There simply wasn’t enough to go around. In Klaus’s opinion no political system that attempted to address a shortage of equality had worked, and none ever would. The world of haves and have-nots was built on Darwinian fitness where survival was its own justification. Pity, mercy, empathy, justice—these were theoretical concepts that held no place in the jungle lives of humankind.

Michael Klaus would be king of the jungle, by any means necessary.

Klaus stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows of his master office suite. He shot the cuffs on a tailored suit and ignored the prostitute as he made his own way out of the lavish room. The lisping Adonis had an envelope of cash and bite marks on his back to remember his visit by. If he was wise and didn’t wish to be found floating facedown in the bay, he’d practice discretion.

Outside over the dark waters of the northern Atlantic dark clouds were piling up on the horizon. Klaus could see whitecaps forming from the stiff breeze that was beginning to hit the beach like a company of shock troops. He imagined it was quite cold out there. He didn’t know firsthand, since he was inside, secured from the environment, untouchable. Insulated. He preferred things this way. He picked up an ultraslim wireless and pressed the push-to-talk button with a manicured finger adorned with a heavy gold ring.

“Ms. Applebaum, is Mr. Skell waiting for me?”

“Yes, Mr. Klaus,” his personal assistant answered immediately. “Shall I send him in?”

“Yes, please.”

Klaus believed in impeccable manners. It was part of the charade, part of the mask of civilization he wore the way any ambush predator blended into its background.

He glanced at the Rolex Executive watch on his thin wrist. The heavy walnut door behind him opened and then closed, but Klaus didn’t turn around. The corporate magnate remained facing his windows, taking in the view.

“I trust you are well, Mr. Skell?”

“I am, sir,” the chief legal officer answered.

On the left of the room a massive aquarium served as a divider between the section of the office suite containing Klaus’s desk and a sunken living-room area where more informal negotiations or conversations took place. Skell crossed to this area and helped himself to a tumbler of single-malt Scotch whiskey. He drank it neat, and it went down in a single swallow without a flinch with a practiced flick of his wrist.

“Well?” Klaus asked.

“Have corporate security made an anti-electronic measures sweep?”

“This morning. Would I talk so openly otherwise?” There was a slight undercurrent to Klaus’s voice now.

Skell, long used to his employer’s moods, sensed it immediately. “I apologize,” he said hastily. “We’re close now and perhaps the stress is getting to me.”

“Perhaps some time alone with all that Thai child porn you’ve collected?” Klaus offered quietly. “Would that relax you?”

Skell winced at the unsubtle reminder of who was master and who was servant. Klaus turned away from the window and looked at him for the first time. He saw a pudgy, balding man with soft hands, a weak chin and slumped shoulders in a suit as expensive as his own. He also saw a brilliant legal pirate with the eyes of a serial killer.

“Why don’t you tell me about our progress?” Klaus offered.

“Everything has gone according to schedule. We found a team of Mossad investigators snooping around in the periphery of our operations but we were able to feed them enough disinformation that they were put onto the wrong track.”

“And the Americans?”

“Officially? Quiet. We’re still well below their radar.”

“Unofficially?”

Skell paused. “There is a…complication,” he admitted.

Klaus slowly put his hands behind his back and pursed his lips. Deliberately he walked forward on expensive Italian loafers. He stopped beside his deck and removed a cigarette from a box on the tabletop and lit it. “Go on,” he said. His words came out in a cloud of blue smoke.

“Two contractors,” Skell began, “working separate aspects of the project. It turns out they were brothers.”

“That was an unfortunate oversight on the part of personnel.”

“They were working for different companies on different sites. One in Southwest Asian operations, the other at the Santo Domingo office.”

As Skell talked Klaus began to move again, trailing cigarette smoke behind him like the front stack on a locomotive. Skell’s knuckles were white around the cut-crystal liquor tumbler in his hands as he felt Klaus getting closer. He knew better than to turn around.

“Don’t we have software indigenous to our record-keeping system that catches this sort of thing?”

“There was a delay in linking the information.” Skell paused slightly. “The employee responsible for such activities has been reprimanded.”

Klaus was close enough behind him now that Skell could smell the man’s cologne. Fat beads of sweat broke out on the lawyer’s bald pate. A heavy hand settled on his right shoulder, then a second fell on his left. Klaus was so close behind him now he could feel the heat of the man’s body.

“Did you do the reprimanding yourself, then?” Klaus asked. His face was so close beside Skell that the question was a whisper in the man’s ear. Cigarette smoke enveloped his head in a cloud, forcing Skell to cough slightly.

“Yes. Yes, I did.”

“Good,” Klaus whispered. Abruptly the German turned and walked back across the room toward his desk, where he ground out the cigarette. “Was there a compromise?”

“We believe so.”

“And?”

“And I think the two know enough to make them curious, to realize there’s a bigger picture, but not enough to make them go to the authorities—yet.”

“Fine. You know what to do, then, correct?”

“I’m putting it into motion right now.”

Klaus walked back over to the windows and clasped his hands behind his back. He stared out at the ocean now roiling under the windstorm hammering the shore.

“That’ll be all.”

HALF AN HOUR LATER Skell sat in the back of a plush company limousine. He swallowed a fistful of antacid tablets, two aspirin and a Xanax and washed them down with a swig of bottled water. His hands were clammy from his perspiration, and when the two men got into the back of the limo with him he didn’t offer to shake hands.

The first man wore a closely shaved haircut and a shrapnel scar that ran along one jawline. His name was Haight and he’d been a sergeant in the French Foreign Legion for ten years before opting to work freelance.

Haight was tall but lean, whipcord thin and possessing the build of an endurance hunting animal like a greyhound or a cheetah. In contrast, the onyx-skinned man who got in behind him was built like a bear.

Robert Skah Lemis had come up on the hard streets of Santo Domingo the rough way. From gang member to police officer to political assassin, he had excelled in making useful connections. He turned chaotic masses of violent, unorganized individuals into functioning syndicates. Money. Guns. Lawyers. In the Caribbean, Lemis controlled and coordinated these things. It had made him very important to Mr. Skell because it allowed the sweating pedophile to look good for his boss, the unforgiving Mr. Klaus.

Skell blinked behind his glasses, his eyes as beady as they were myopic. Haight smelled like aftershave and Lemis smelled like marijuana. The tip of his tongue looked pink and vaguely sluglike against the fat cupid bow of his pursed lips. A sheen of sweat covered him, casting an unhealthy aurora.

“Here,” he said briskly.

He opened a titanium briefcase covered in a thin layer of calfskin and set with gold fixtures. From inside he pulled out two flash drives and handed them to the mercenaries sitting across from him. Both men took great pains to ensure their hands didn’t touch Skell’s.

As the two middle managers placed the flash drives inside their coat pockets Skell gave them a brief rundown.

“Each flash drive contains information on men we want captured, interrogated and disposed of. Ironically, but unimportant to you, the men are brothers named Smith. One is currently an FBI agent on liaison in the Dominican Republic, and the other is a private military contractor flying unmanned aerial vehicles on surveillance missions in Kyrgyzstan. They learned something they shouldn’t have. The details will be provided in the digital briefings.

“Once we’ve figured out how much they discovered, we won’t need them anymore. Put together your teams, arrange transportation, perform the captures, conduct the interrogations, dispose of the bodies. We need this done fast and we are willing to provide you a fifteen percent bonus over and above our normal understandings.”

Lemis grinned. His mouth was huge and his white teeth lit up his face like lights on a Christmas tree. “That’s good stuff. I’ll have the motherfucker wrapped up like candy in a day.”

Haight frowned. “My end isn’t going to be so tidy. A job like this I’m going to have to use ex-Soviet troops. Bulgarians for the interviews, Russians for the shock troops. I go open market, I can’t promise they won’t run their mouths off about doing an American to inflate their rep. I go with quiet professionals, I run the risk of getting boys tied in closely with the intelligence services or the syndicates.” He leaned back in his seat and shrugged his shoulders. “If we were doing this in Africa it might be a different story…but Kyrgyzstan?”

Skell drew his lips together, forming his mouth into a pout. “Total unit closure?” he suggested.

Haight shook his head. “Too large a crew on this one. I recruit twenty shooters and one or two spooks, then they all turn up missing, I’m fucking done.”

“Fine. Use people who can keep their mouth shut. We have ways of dampening down the exposure on the intelligence front.” Mentally he adjusted the cost expenditure for the operation. He frowned slightly, then decided it was obviously still cost-effective given the alternative.

Once the American dollar had been devalued the resulting profit margin from Mr. Klaus’s currency speculation would be so considerable that a few million-dollar bribes to Russian generals at the old Kremlin would hardly be missed.

CHAPTER TWO

Southern Caribbean

The NA-265—60 Saberliner Jet cut through the air at well over 500 mph. Below the forty-four-foot wingspan wisps of clouds obscured the view of the Caribbean Ocean. To the west the sun was setting in an explosion of reddish-yellow light.

The civilian jet was flown by a skeleton crew of three pilots from the Central Intelligence Agency’s clandestine service, while in the passenger area the three operators of Able Team lounged after being picked up after a mission in the Uruguay capital of Montevideo.

Big, blond and built like a nightclub bouncer, Carl Lyons reclined in one of the plush seats and stared out the window. Wearing civilian clothes and tan, thick-soled hiking boots, he looked rumpled, dirty and tired. One knee of his jeans was stained with blood splatter and his hands smelled like cordite. He set down his can of soda and crossed one size-twelve boot over his knee.

He noticed absentmindedly that the toe and tread of his boot were flecked with brain matter. He turned to look at the mustached, sandy-haired man sprawled in the seat across the narrow aisle from him.

“You think you used enough Semtex in that last satchel charge?” Lyons asked, voice dry.

Hermann Schwarz shrugged as he opened a can of soda. He took a long drink, then shrugged again.

“Don’t know,” he admitted. “I mean, the door came open. Right?”

“Every ass clown in that FARC hit squad came out the opening looking like fruit in a blender,” Rosario Blancanales pointed out.

“Did I tell ’em to carry a suitcase full of grenades?” Schwarz countered.

“Barb’s going to be pissed we didn’t recover any intelligence artifacts,” Lyons pointed out. The leader of Able Team referred to Barbara Price, the mission controller at their organizational headquarters, Stony Man Farm.

“I’m really more of an engineer and less of an archaeologist,” Schwarz answered.

“Who said anything about archaeologists?” Lyons demanded.

“It was a play on the dual use of the term ‘artifact’ you mentioned,” Blancanales explained.

“Thank you,” Schwarz said.

“It was also stupid and obvious,” Blancanales continued.

“Thank you,” Lyons said.

The digital speakers of the Saberliner’s PA system cut on and the pilot’s voice, sounding well modulated and distant, cut in. “I got an alert from HQ,” the woman said. “You have a fragmentation order. Please access the communications display in your table.”

“Speaking of Mama Bear…” Blancanales grinned.

Reaching out a single blunt finger, Lyons jabbed it into the console button. A section of the desktop slid back to reveal a recessed screen and keyboard. A red light next to a digital camera blinked on and the blank image on the screen snapped into resolution, revealing the attractive features of the honey-blond Stony Man mission controller, Barbara Price.

“Good work in Uruguay,” Price said. “I’ve got something new for you.”

From behind the television Blancanales snorted in laughter. “I wish she’d knock it off already with all the chitchat and get to business.”

“No shit,” Schwarz muttered.

Lyons scowled in their direction out of habit. “Go ahead, Barb,” he said.

“Hal just got a request through the Justice Department,” Price started, referencing Hal Brognola, the director of the Sensitive Operations Group which oversaw Stony Man Farm and its teams. “An investigative liaison for the FBI assigned to the Dominican Republic went missing twelve hours ago.”

“I’m not tracking,” Lyons said with a frown. “This doesn’t sound like an Able operation.” Looking down, he saw the blood splatter on his boot. “At all,” he added.

“We have three major problems,” Price began.

“Here it comes,” Schwarz said.

“One, the agent’s mission was twofold. Ostensibly he was helping with money-laundering operations used by international drug cartels. For that assignment he was given a Dominican counterpart. Partway into that investigation he came across evidence of corruption within the nation’s security services.”

“Gasp.” Blancanales shook his head.

“He was instructed to keep a low profile and to build a file to be turned over to the State Department. He went to meet a confidential informant and failed to make his last two check-ins.”

“Surely the Feds have protocols for that?” Lyons pointed out.

“They do,” Price answered. “The problem is that six hours ago police forces opened fire on an eighteen-year-old boy in a Santo Domingo ghetto. The police claimed the boy was resisting arrest, but witnesses claim he was unarmed. It turned out the boy was the son of the president’s chief political opponent.”

“Uh-oh,” Schwarz said. “The plot thickens.”

“Street gangs loyal to the opposition party immediately began rioting. The government responded with force and the unrest has now spread to all major parts of the city. The consulate is locked down. Nonessential personnel have been choppered out to Navy ships offshore. The city is locked down under martial law and the State Department has declared the Dominican a nonpermissive area.”

“Meaning no unescorted diplomats or government personnel,” Lyons finished.

“The government has refused to give sanction to any retrievals or investigations by us until the civil unrest has been contained,” Price said.

“And all the evidence wiped clean,” Blancanales added.

“Your pilot has been given her new flight instructions. You’ll touch down at the auxiliary executive airport just outside of town. To clear customs you’ll have to come out of this plane without the gear you used in Uruguay. Someone from the consulate will be waiting for you. Carmen has just sent the coordinates to a joint CIA/DEA safehouse to Schwarz’s BlackBerry. Go there, equip and go over what files we got on the missing agent’s case.”

“Sounds good,” Lyons said and nodded.

“Remember,” Price added. “We have no Dominican liaison for you. We do not have permission to operate. The city is locked with riots and under martial law. As far as we are concerned, the FBI’s contacts in Santo Domingo are compromised. This is going to be hairy.”

Schwarz looked at his teammates. “What’s new?” he asked.

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

INSIDE THE communications center of the underground Annex, Barbara Price clicked off the screen to the communications relay station and slowly turned in her chair. She saw Aaron “Bear” Kurtzman, leader of the Stony Man cyberteam, waiting for her. The burly man was sitting comfortably in a motorized wheelchair outfitted with an array of computer uplinks and interfaces.

There were two steaming mugs of coffee in his huge paws. He leaned forward and handed one to Price, who took it gratefully. She sipped at the coffee and looked up in surprise.

“This is great!” she sputtered. “You made this?”

Kurtzman grinned from behind his mug, suddenly self-conscious. “Yeah…I really don’t know what happened.”

“Is Phoenix in the conference room?”

“McCarter and James are,” Kurtzman replied. Price rose and began walking. “The rest of them are at the equipment cages getting gear ready for the airlift.”

“Good,” Price said, exiting the communications center.

Kurtzman followed the woman as she strode quickly down the hallway, pulling an iPhone free. Carmen Delahunt, the red-haired ex–FBI agent, came up and offered Price a form.

“Requisitions needs your signature for the AT-4s,” the woman explained.

Price shifted her phone to the crook of her shoulder and scrawled her name across the form. On the phone the connection clicked into place.

“Go for Brognola,” Hal Brognola said in his usual gruff voice.

“What are you doing?” Price asked.

She began walking again and the motor of Kurtzman’s chair whined as he followed her down the hall.

“Trying to ram our budget past the cabinet,” he replied. “You realize we use more ammunition than the entire United States Marine Corps in a year?”

“Even now?”

“Even now,” the big Fed said drolly. “What can I do for you? Able en route?”

“Able’s scrambling for the Dominican,” she confirmed.

She spun on her heel and shoved open the door to the Annex conference room, barging in to see Phoenix Force leader David McCarter and team medic Calvin James waiting for her.

“Phoenix?” Brognola demanded.

“That’s why I’m calling,” Price replied.

She pointed a finger at Kurtzman, then at the wall and the tech administrator worked a sequence on his chair-mounted keyboard. Instantly the plasma wall monitor sparked into life and went to its default setting of a global atlas.

“What do you need?”

On the screen the geographical image was overlaid with two thin red lines, one for latitude and one for longitude. Wherever the two lines intersected, a box formed, capturing the terrain and political information of any spot on the planet. Kurtzman worked a mouseball on his keyboard.

“Before I scramble Phoenix,” Price continued, “I need to know if I’m going to get overflight permission from Uzbekistan or if we have to get a plane capable of maintaining enough altitude to avoid detection during the insertion.”

“Just a second,” Brognola said. “Let me call a general at Stratcom to sense the general impression before I try to get it authorized.”

“I’ll hold,” Price said.

Calvin James, former Navy SEAL, turned toward the Phoenix Force leader, David McCarter. “We’re going to Kyrgyzstan.”

McCarter, a former British Special Air Service commando, shook his head. “Nah, Tajikistan. They’ve been having problems north of Kabul lately.”

“Kyrgyzstan,” James replied stubbornly.

“Twenty spot on it?”

“Done.” James shook the fox-faced Briton’s hand.

On the screen the lat and long lines settled over central Asia. The political lines showing the border of Kyrgyzstan with China on the right and Tajikistan on the south and Kazakhstan to the north and west showed up. Then the mountain range in the southeast of Kyrgyzstan was pulled up in vivid relief reading.

“Pay up, limey.” James smirked.

McCarter scowled good-naturedly. “I’ll get you in a bit.”

“You’re worse than Hawkins about paying up.”

“All right,” Price interrupted. “While I’m waiting for Hal to check this angle, we’ll move forward. This operation is a supplementation to an operational focus initiated by Joint Special Operations Command. We’re going to be performing direct-action missions based on information fed us by the Intelligence Support Activity,” Price explained, referencing the Pentagon unit tasked specifically with providing tactical information to special operations forces independent of civilian intelligence agencies. “What do you know about Kyrgyzstan?”

James shrugged. “There are clashes going on between progovernment and opposition forces. The government is threatening to balkanize, making the whole area highly unstable. There’ve been increased activity of extremist groups in the area. Most especially the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, or IMU, a terror group with direct links to al Qaeda.”

“Those are our boys,” Price said. “We have good intel they’re planning attacks on U.S. government facilities in the region. JSOC has had to shift too many assets south into Pakistan because of increased Taliban activity in the northwest border region there. They asked if we could send you boys to war.”

McCarter sat up. “Straight fights?”

“Is anything you do straight?” Kurtzman asked.

McCarter looked at him. “I’m not quite sure how to take that, mate.” He paused, then lifted an eyebrow. “Are you flirting with me, Bear?”

“Yes. Yes, I am,” Kurtzman said and nodded.

“If we’re done playing eHarmony.com do you think we could get back to the briefing?” Price asked.

“We’re going after bad guys?” James asked.

“Hunter-killer operation, search and destroy,” Price confirmed.

“I’m so happy,” McCarter replied.

Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

THE SABERLINER BANKED hard as it made its approach.

Out their windows the members of Able Team could see several columns of thick, black smoke roiling up as the city burned. Dominican politics started at the street level and worked its way up. Public housing units and neighborhoods were carved into voting districts, and political workers utilized street gangs and corrupt police to intimidate voters and manipulate precincts.

Democracy in the Dominican Republic, much like ghetto-level law enforcement, was an exercise in violence, bribery and fraudulent activity on such a widespread scale that it was endemic to the nation.

The smooth, well-modulated voice of the pilot broke over the speaker. “I just received permission to land at the executive auxiliary airport,” she informed them. “But I’ve been advised that customs has shut down the gates as a result of the rioting.”

“Damn it,” Lyons muttered. “Nothing can ever be simple.” He paused. “Ever.”

Blancanales turned toward the speaker and addressed the pilot. “How soon can you do a turn-around and be in the air?” he asked.

There was a pause then a slight buzz of feedback as the pilot opened the channel again. “Ten or fifteen minutes,” she replied. “Just long enough for the ground crews to turn the plane around. There are no other planes scheduled ahead of us.” She clicked off then added, voice dry, “We’re apparently the only ‘executives’ stupid enough to land in Santo Domingo in the middle of chaotic civil unrest.”

“I don’t suppose you have, um…contingency items on board?” Schwarz asked.

“We’re not that kind of ride, gentlemen,” she answered. “We get things done by flying under the radar.”

“Ha-ha.” Lyons scowled.

CHAPTER THREE

With a bemused expression Hermann Schwarz watched the Saberliner take off. Beside him Blancanales was engaged in a rapid-fire exchange with an airport official while Carl Lyons stood off a short distance, big arms folded over a massive chest, scowl firmly in place.

The Dominican Republic had the feel of a hell zone, Schwarz reflected. He’d seen plenty of Third World trouble spots in his time, first with the military and then with Stony Man. The air was thick with humidity, heavy with equatorial-influenced heat. The smell of smoke from structure fires floated on the air with a greasy, acrid stench that was impossible to mistake.

He could hear the sounds of people rioting just blocks from his location, the dull roar punctuated by shrill staccato of police and emergency vehicle sirens. Occasionally there was the bark of firearms, sometimes even the sharp boom of a gasoline tank going up. The city was still reeling from two hurricanes that had blown ashore this season alone. Political corruption had only delayed and diluted the response. Private aid companies such as UNICEF and the Red Cross had been forced to use UN peacekeepers to deliver food and medicine. Some organizations had even been forced to hire private military companies to ensure delivery to areas deemed too hostile for UN security platoons.

Sometimes the Dominican military helped; sometimes they exacerbated the problems. Likewise with the police, the government bureaucrats and even the street warlords.

Schwarz snorted himself out of his reflection with sardonic cynicism. A flying cockroach the size of a Ping-Pong ball buzzed his head. He turned away and spit onto the concrete.

“Hot,” he said.

Lyons nodded. “Sun’s going down,” the Able Team leader said. Both men were waiting to see if Rosario “Politician” Blancanales would successfully work his special brand of magic on the airport official. If not, things were going to get increasingly difficult. “You make the crew at the gate?” Lyons asked.

Schwarz nodded without turning around. “Sure. Port authority patrolmen. M-16s and maybe a two-way radio.”

The customs force was parked at an employee access gate about fifty yards from where Able Team stood next to an upgraded Quonset hut hangar. Three police officers with a sergeant of the guard had parked a white soft-top Land Rover next to the chain-link gate.

The men ran to a type, tall and whipcord-lean with very dark skin. Their weapons were held casually and their uniforms, loose British-style tan jungle khakis, were reasonably maintained. Just beyond them a long asphalt road ran along a boulder-and-ballast dike across a swampy stretch of land before entering a rundown neighborhood.

Schwarz gestured with his chin toward the urban buildup beyond the garbage-strewed marsh before slapping at a mosquito on his neck. “You wanna take the back road?”

“Seems wise,” Lyons agreed. “We go out the front gate into the shopping district, we’re only going to run into more patrols and checkpoints.”

“Gangs are going to run the neighborhoods. Might be just as bad,” Schwarz pointed out.

“Gangs won’t cause as much trouble in the long run,” Lyons countered. “With the dead bodies and all,” he added.

Schwarz smirked. “Thanks for clearing that up. For a moment I thought you meant they’d be able to trace all the bibles we’d be handing out back to the Farm.”

Lyons ignored him, turned back toward the gate. His eyes narrowed as he sized the men up. “I’d rather bribe ’em,” he admitted.

“The safehouse’ll have operational funds but for now we’re fresh off the plane. We either get out of this gate or we fail. It’s one or the other.”

“Don’t I know,” Lyons said. “I just hope Hal’s contacts will pull through.”

“Maybe if the government wasn’t under siege…” Schwarz trailed off.

“I guess if I don’t like it I can always go back to being a cop.” Lyons turned his head and spit on a beetle longer than his thumb as it scurried by on the concrete. The air was so damp from the humidity he felt as if he was being water boarded.

“Our target is out there,” Schwarz reminded him. “I kinda doubt they’re going to let us just track him down. I got long odds on us getting our ticket out that gate.”

Lyons nodded. He lifted one fist the size of a canned ham and squeezed it with his other hand. The knuckles popped like gunshots. “There’s an American in trouble,” the ex–LAPD detective said. “Bad day to be a Dominican customs cop.”

“Have you seen this place?” Schwarz grunted. “Every day is a bad day for those poor sons of bitches.”

Blancanales nodded, then thanked the minor bureaucrat he was addressing. The man walked away and Blancanales came toward them. He looked jaunty and upbeat as he approached, but that was just the man’s basic personality. Lyons knew before the stocky Puerto Rican said anything that it was a wash.

“Did Barb call us?” Blancanales asked without preamble.

“No updates, no frag orders, no reprieves,” Schwarz answered. “We either give here or roll out that gate, brother.”

“Oh, we’re going out that gate,” Lyons said.

Kyrgyzstan

0430 am local time

THE ISOSCELES-TRIANGLE-shaped delta aircraft streaked across central Asian airspace. Four pulse detonation engines hammered the flying wedge forward at Mach 5. Normally staffed with two flight officers, one pilot and one reconnaissance officer, the converted aircraft was piloted by Stony Man ace Jack Grimaldi, who flew solo on this mission.

Cameras, sensors, remote imagers and central processing units had been removed and the body retrofitted to provide a drop platform for airborne insertion. In the dark, claustrophobic hold Phoenix Force waited, attached to oxygen until the GPS system alerted them to their proximity to the jump zone.

A tiny red light blinked once, then shifted to amber. Inside the transport chamber the five commandos felt the airframe shudder under the stress of declining speed. The oxygen system was pumping pure oxygen into the Phoenix Force operators, flushing nitrogen from their blood systems in preparation for the drop to offset hypoxia complications.

On the instrument panel the jump light clicked over from amber to green. Grimaldi reached out and flipped the toggle switch, activating the hydraulic ramp. Within seconds the team was gone into the central Asian night.

The five black figures were invisible against the dark backdrop of the night sky. Unit commander David McCarter, himself a jumpmaster from the elite British Special Air Service, kept a close eye on the plunging members of his team.

Using his altimeter as a guide, McCarter gave the signal to disengage from supplemental oxygen. The air that high above the black-and-gray checkerboard of the landscape was chill as the commandos breathed it in.

At the predetermined altitude McCarter gave the signal and the loose circle of paratroopers broke away, turning into corkscrew spiral led by the British soldier. The black silk parachute of combat diver Rafael Encizo billowed up and popped open to begin the deployment sequence.

The four other members of Phoenix dropped past the paragliding Cuban-American and in quick succession ex–Navy SEAL Calvin James, then Canadian special forces veteran Gary Manning pulled their ripcords. McCarter and T. J. Hawkins dropped below the rest before the Texan and former Delta Force operator deployed his own parachute.

McCarter turned in his free fall and yanked his own ripcord. His chute unfurled and snapped open, jerking him up short. Arrayed behind and above him the team continued its descent in a long, staggered but symmetrical line.

McCarter led the paragliding procession using his wrist-mounted GPS unit to guide the team down to a narrow plateau on a ridge of low, sparsely wooded hills set above a road.

He used his time under the canopy to do a last-minute reconnaissance of the area as he dropped. Off to the northeast he was able to clearly distinguish a long line of headlights coming from the northwest. He felt a certain grim satisfaction as he realized his prey was heading directly toward the guns of his team.

He flared the chute as he touched down, then absorbed the impact up through the soles of his old Russian army boots. McCarter, like the rest of Phoenix Force, was dressed in a motley collection of drab, local civilian garb and Soviet-era Russian army uniform items. Their weapons were Russian, their faces covered in beards, and their equipment from explosives to communications and medical items were common black market items available in the arms bazaars of Armenian criminal syndicates.

Moving quickly, McCarter turned and began collecting his chute, rolling it into a tight ball as the rest of his men landed around him. Hawkins quickly unzipped an SVD sniper rifle from its cushioned carryall and powered up the illumination optics on the night scope.

As the other three members began to cache the drop gear, Hawkins went to the edge of the windswept gravel landing zone to pull security while McCarter worked his scrambled communications uplink.

“Phoenix Actual to Stony Farm,” he barked.

“Go for Stony,” Price replied immediately.

“We’re on the ground and initiating movement to target,” McCarter informed the woman.

“Good copy,” Price acknowledged. “We have eyes on,” she assured the field commander.

Above their heads the Stony Man’s own Keyhole satellite had spun into geosynchronous orbit and the NASA cameras began focusing tightly on the broken terrain with a lens capability so powerful it could read the license plate of a speeding vehicle at night. The ghostly white figures of Phoenix Force appeared on Price’s heads-up display back in the Virginia command and control center.

On the stark, exposed finger of the central Asian topography McCarter turned as his team cached the last of their jump gear and began to assemble and ready their primary weapons. Besides Hawkins and his SVD sniper rifle, the massive, thickly muscled frame of Gary Manning was adorned with a 7.62 mm RPK machine gun. The short fire-plug profile of Rafael Encizo came up behind the Canadian, a Type 50 submachine gun his hands. The compact weapon was a prolific Chinese knock-off of the Soviet-era PPSh-41 SMG, and Encizo used it to supplement the RPG-7 launcher he carried along with a sling of HE rockets.

Calvin James was the second half of Phoenix Force’s rocket team. He was also armed with an RPG-7 and Type 50. For his part David McCarter would be using a cut-down AKS-74 outfitted with a black market M-203 40 mm grenade launcher.

“We’re ready to roll,” Manning informed McCarter.

McCarter nodded, then spoke into his uplink. “How we looking out there, Hawk?”

“All clear on the approach route,” he answered.

“Copy. Bound forward one hundred yards into overwatch and will move into position.”

“Hawk out.”

“Let’s go,” McCarter ordered.

The four-man assault squad fell into a loose Ranger file with McCarter leading and Manning with his machine gun bringing up the rear. For McCarter the movement to target held a surreal quality. The stark, denuded geography seemed like a moonscape through the filtering lens of their commercial night-vision goggles. Each footfall sent puffs of pale dust billowing up, and there was the constant companion of high-altitude wind.

Around them the bare tops of hills rising from a lightly wooded river valley sat like a twisting barrier to the grasslands just beyond, stretching all the way toward the Chinese border.

Moving quickly, the team linked up with Hawkins and moved into position above a narrow switchback in an ancient dirt road carved out decades ago through the low mountains. McCarter called a halt and the team took three minutes to drink water from their canteens.

Once again Hawkins with his telescopic lens was dispatched to the periphery of the formation to provide security as the other four members of Phoenix Force prepped the assault site. Wooden-handled Soviet entrenching tools quickly hacked narrow holes into the side of the earth. Belay pinions were shoved in and buried, forming dead man hangs that allowed the team to deploy their rappel ropes.

“I’ve got the scout vehicle at the bottom of the canyon,” Hawkins said, breaking radio silence.

McCarter narrowed his eyes and turned his ear into the chill bite of the wind. On the air he could clearly make out the throaty growls of heavy engines climbing a steep grade in low gear. “Copy,” he told Hawkins. Turning back toward his teammates, he gave terse directions. “We have initial eyes on. Snap into ropes and ready weapons.”

Without comment all four commandos snapped their ropes into the D-ring carabiners of their rappel harnesses. Once locked into their drop rigs, Calvin James and Rafael Encizo quickly laid out several warheads and primed their RPGs. Beside them Gary Manning methodically dropped down the folding legs on his machine gun’s bipod and settled into position on the flank of the hit squad, poised to pour 7.62 mm rounds down the steep incline and onto the road below.

There was a harsh metallic click as he racked the bolt and chambered the first round on his belt. “Terrorist surprise package hot,” he declared in a soft self-satisfied voice.

McCarter grunted in response and slid home a high-explosive 40 mm grenade into his M-203 launcher. Once he was locked and loaded he pulled his Combat Personal Data Assistant out from a Cordura and Kevlar pouch. The CPDA had a commercial housing that on initial inspection hid the electronic upgrades provided by Stony Man’s technical section.

McCarter turned his head away from the bite of the omnipresent and icy breeze, bringing his finger up to key his mic. “Stony, you have eyes over target?”

“Affirmative,” Price replied.

“Send signal to my hand unit for final confirmation,” McCarter instructed.

Having given his instructions, McCarter held up the CPDA and opened the screen to the digital feed. So far every aspect of their intelligence had been correct, but he wanted to have absolute confirmation that he wasn’t accidentally taking down a civilian caravan before he turned Phoenix Force loose on the line of vehicles below.

On his screen the satellite feed appeared, the line of vehicles appearing as white outlines against the cold dark of the Kyrgyzstan geography. The hoods of the trucks glowed slightly from the reflected heat of the hardworking engines and the headlights flashed in hard shards of illuminations. With all the reflected light McCarter was able to clearly pick out the six vehicles of the convoy.

Two commercial four-wheel-drive pickups ran at the front of the vehicle line, followed by three Russian army five-ton trucks with canvas sheaths over the rear storage compartments. The final big truck was uncovered, leaving the several men of the gun crew exposed. Four men in loose turban-style headgear manned a 20 mm antiaircraft gun.

McCarter felt like purring as he clicked his push-to-talk button on the com uplink. “I have visual confirmation of target,” he told Stony Man.

“You are cleared to engage,” Barbara Price informed him.

CHAPTER FOUR

Dominican Republic

Able Team was a direct-action unit that identified its targets and went forward until enemy combatants had been neutralized in one fashion or another. Capable of stealth and subterfuge, the team was a trio of extremely fit, extremely confident special operators used to sizing up all manner of opposition—soldiers, police, criminals and spies. It wasn’t hard to identify the hard-eyed Carl Lyons and more laconic features of Rosario Blancanales and Hermann Schwarz as experienced ass kickers.

The sun was low in the sky, radiating heat like a flamethrower, and the humidity was so thick it felt like a hanging curtain as Able Team approached the customs police in a loose triangle with Lyons at the front.

Recognizing the potential for trouble, the four guards dropped hands to the grips of weapons and stiffened their posture. The leader of the group, an extremely dark-skinned islander with a seemingly fleshless skull, threw a half-smoked cigarette to the ground and let it smolder.

As the three Stony Man operatives approached, Blancanales and Schwarz drifted out a few steps to the side, turning their approach wedge in a softly enveloping semicircle that kept the bodies of the customs officers trapped between themselves and the frame of their vehicle.

Sensing trouble but seeing no weapons, the officer took a step forward and opened his mouth to bark an order.

Lyons lifted up a meaty fist and snapped it forward down his center line in an old-school karate punch. The first two knuckles of his fist slammed into the custom officer’s chin, his jaw hanging loose as he prepared to speak. The hinge joint where the jawbone joined the skull was rammed backward, mauling the nerves centered there. The officer went down like a pole-axed steer in a Chicago stockyard, instantly unconscious.

Hermann Schwarz moved in close to his target, his limbs tracing predetermined combative patterns. His left hand slapped the barrel of his man’s weapon to one side, his right hand snapping once in a short jab to the man’s solar plexus that doubled him over, followed by a hook that took the man flush along his temple and dropped him instantly.

On the opposite side of Lyons from Schwarz, ex–Special Forces soldier Rosario Blancanales hammered into his own opponent. The Puerto Rican commando slammed his left hand against the forestock of the man’s rifle, pushing it hard into the startled Dominican’s chest and trapping it against the torso.

Caught by surprise, the man’s first instinct was to clutch his weapon even more tightly, slowing his response to the attack. Immediately, Blancanales snapped the edge of his right hand into the side of the Dominican’s neck, striking the officer along his carotid sinus. The man’s eyes rolled upward until only whites showed and he crumpled to the ground at his feet.

The final officer had time to swing a clumsy over-hand buttstroke toward Lyons, who deflected it with the palm of his hand before catching the overmatched soldier on the angle of his chin with a powerful boxer’s hook that dropped him.

“Let’s go,” Lyons snapped, jumping to work.

Quickly they used the downed men’s own handcuffs to secure them before stripping weapons, a cell phone, vehicle ignition keys and an ancient Motorola handheld walkie-talkie from the checkpoint officers.

“Do you think three white dudes in a government-marked jeep will be suspicious?” Schwarz asked, voice wry, as he fired up the vehicle.

“Speak for yourself, Mr. White Guy,” Blancanales said as he jumped in the back seat and pushed the police weapons out of obvious sight.

“Just try to look official until we can get a different ride,” Lyons said.

Schwarz pushed the accelerator down and gunned the jeep down the asphalt service road running behind the airport and toward Santo Domingo. Beside him Lyons was using thick fingers to triangulate a GPS-guided route on the screen of his CPDA.

Ahead of them a line of aluminum-and-clapboard shanties formed a labyrinthine barrier on the outskirts of the town. Beyond this ramshackle slum in the more built-up areas of the city, columns of brown-and-black smoke rose and the wail of sirens could be easily picked out, punctuated by the sharp reports of gunfire. Forming a backdrop to this was an audible sound of the rioting mobs forming a sort of human white noise that underlined and overlaid everything else.

Santo Domingo was a city on fire.

Working on his navigational program, Lyons snarled in disgust and shoved the CPDA away. “The damn thing only wants to give me obvious thoroughfare,” he explained, voice terse with frustration. “We roll down main avenues and we’re going to hit crowds and riot police every fifty fucking yards.”

“Oh, now you don’t want to be obvious?” Blancanales called out from the back seat.

Schwarz reached the end of the service lane and swerved off onto a side road to avoid running into any official traffic working checkpoints or coming from the opposite direction.

He swerved to avoid a stray dog and ran the vehicle through a rut into a long shallow puddle of polluted ditch water. They entered a winding street of the shanty slum and were immediately forced to slow because of the people milling around. Though not rioting, this group of citizens was clearly anxious about the situation and crowded the sides of the street.

A sea of dark faces turned in surprise toward the three men in the jeep. Dogs barked as bystanders pointed with open curiosity at the sight. Other vehicles, freight trucks, minibikes and taxis, began to clog the road, slowing Schwarz’s speed.

Lyons mulled over his situation as Schwarz expertly guided the vehicle through the narrow twisting lanes. Groups of young males, some openly carrying machetes, began to appear on street corners.

“We’ve still got five miles to go to the docks,” Blancanales pointed out. “We’re going to be playing Russian roulette in a couple of minutes once we get into the industrial and merchant areas,” Blancanales continued. “I don’t mind putting a couple of this regime’s bully boys to sleep to get a ride, but I don’t think a gun battle is going to be productive.”

“I’m open to suggestions,” Lyons said, hooded eyes watching the crowds and vehicles for any sign of a threat.

“Why don’t we take a taxi?” Schwarz offered.

“We don’t have any cash and I didn’t think to rob those clowns from the airport,” Lyons replied.

“We barter?”

“What? Not weapons?” Lyons demanded.

“Why not? You said it yourself—we either do what we have to do to save the American or we go home now. We’ve been put in an imperfect situation. We can either keep a moral high ground or, you know, actually succeed at the goddamn mission.”

“We got a cell phone,” Blancanales leaned forward and pointed out. “I can use that and the lead officer’s pistol to get us a ride, I think. If you want, I can use my pocket knife to juke the fire pin so that it looks all right but will snap when fired.”

“I doubt they’ll even look as long as there are bullets in the clip,” Schwarz argued. “If you want we could just toss the recoil spring altogether. No harm no foul…sort of.” He grinned through his mustache.

Lyons nodded once. “Let’s do it.”

Within half a block of deciding to act, Blancanales had expertly sabotaged the 9 mm pistol. When they found a driver in a battered silver Kia Sophia taxi three minutes later, Blancanales was forced to add the keys to the jeep into the mix but Able Team had secured a driver.

They quickly pulled down a narrow dirt lane overhung with laundry and the curious eyes of the slum’s inhabitants. Using their own lightweight jackets as makeshift covers for their longer weapons, Able Team left the government jeep behind and piled into the cramped confines of the taxi.

The driver was in his sixties, scar-faced, with arthritis-gnarled hands and flawless British-accented English. The man watched his passengers with a wary eye but quickly navigated the car away from the scene.

Within seconds Able Team was driving into the heart of an urban firestorm of riots and military police units.

Kyrgyzstan

ABOVE THE CENTRAL ASIAN HILLS clouds began to form, casting dark shadows on the already dark terrain. On the ridgeline above the narrow mountain road Phoenix Force lay in wait, five ambush predators waiting for their quarry.

Weapon muzzles tracked the approach as gleaming headlights appeared on the twisting road. The engines snarled as the vehicle operators ground the gears up the steep grade.

Watching through his night-vision goggles, McCarter felt a professional satisfaction as he surveyed his ambush site. It was a perfect amalgamation of satellite imagery and tactical experience. It was a lethal kill box.

The operation was designed to neutralize an informational node terrorist cell propagating chaos and unrest in underdeveloped and weak countries. The traveling team were graduates of al Qaeda training camps in the former Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. The command-and-control instructors educated local radicals in logistics, administration, financing and target selection, ruthlessly turning clumsy, disorganized gangs of killers into streamlined, corporate models of murderous efficiency.

Phoenix Force was about to execute their own lessons in murderous efficiency.

“Wait for my call,” McCarter said smoothly. “On my call, strike our predetermined targets.”

“Copy,” Hawkins answered.

“Copy,” Encizo acknowledged.

“Copy,” James echoed.

“Copy,” Manning finished.

Below the ex–SAS commando the terrorist convoy ground past. He watched the scout vehicles crawl past his position, close enough now to see the glow of the occupants’ cigarettes. Fifty yards down the line, the last truck brought up the rear. The convoy commander had allowed the rough terrain to cause his drivers to bunch up too closely together.

It was a fundamental mistake McCarter intended to exploit.

Slowly, McCarter lifted the butt of his AKS and nestled it into his shoulder. His trigger hand found the curve of his 30-round magazine and his finger lay on the smooth metal curve of the M 203’s trigger as his free hand grasped the grenade launcher by its grooved tube.

To either side of him he could feel the men of his unit tensed and poised for his command, ready to unleash a heavy curtain of hellfire on the terrorists below him. He moved his boot slightly and dislodged a stone.

The pebble slid free of the initial lip of the ledge and slid downhill, dislodging a miniature avalanche of gravel that petered out halfway down the incline grade. McCarter let the pent-up air in his lungs escape in a slow hiss as he squeezed his trigger.

The recoil of the shot rocked his carbine back into his shoulder as the round discharged with its signature bloop sound. As the first-strike signal, McCarter had reserved the right to call his target on site instead of taking an assigned target as they’d discussed in their mission workup.

Due to the heavy firepower potential of the 20 mm antiaircraft gun in the last truck, he made the decision to put his first HEDP into it. With surprise, aggression of action, command of terrain and superior training Phoenix Force held the upper hand in the conventional military ambush. If there was any possible game changer then it was the heavy weapon serving as the convoy tail gun.

His round arched into the night, its velocity low enough that he could just trace the arc of its movement as it sailed out across the length of a soccer field toward the truck.

In the next instant there was a flash of light, followed by the thump of the HE round going off. Then men started screaming as fire rolled up in a brilliant orange ball toward the sky and the battle began.

Keyed to the actions of their team leader, both Calvin James and Rafael Encizo reacted instantly, triggering their RPG-7s within breaths of each other. The twin warheads streaked out from the overhang in flashes of ignition fire on traverses almost 180 degrees apart. Encizo fired his round toward the hood and cab of the rear truck already struck by McCarter’s 40 mm round, while James angled his into the undercarriage of the lead pickup.

The RPG rounds struck the convoy almost simultaneously. The rockets hammered home with ruthless force. James’s round was an inch low and struck the hard gravel road exactly between the front and rear driver’s-side tires. The round detonated, spreading a lethal umbrella of shrapnel and flame that first shredded then ignited the vehicle’s fuel tank.

The secondary explosion was massive, picking up the light sports utility vehicle and its armed tribesmen and flipping them upside down in a bonfire of orange flame and roiling black smoke. Bodies spun like pinwheels as limbs were ripped free and thrown next to scorched torsos.

Encizo’s round cut across the distance at a sharp angle with a screaming, swooshing sound as distinct as any human voice. The rocket skipped off the angled hood of the old Soviet-era truck and skimmed into the windshield. Flames shot out the truck cab through windows in all four directions.

The expanding concussion wave of the exploding RPG warhead ripped back through the dash and hammered into the truck’s massive engine block, igniting the vehicle’s fluids.

With two well-placed applications of ballistic high explosives, Phoenix Force had effectively pinned the convoy in place on the narrow mountain road. The remaining terrorist troops were left with nowhere to run, no where to escape, and the surrounding terrain made a counterattack virtually impossible.

Manning opened up with his RPK, the weapon hammering out a long burst of 7.62 mm ComBloc rounds that he stitched down the exposed side of the trapped vehicles from one burning truck to the next. His rounds perforated the thin metal of the light-skinned trucks, hammering out divots and burrowing into scrambling, screaming, frantic flesh. His burst broke bones, opened wounds and split skulls as the hapless terrorists twisted and danced under the withering fire.

On the opposite end of the spectrum Hawkins turned his sniper optics on, the nighttime target range as brilliantly lit as a summer day in his home state of Texas. He fired, rode the recoil, adjusted his aim and fired again with an industrial efficiency so smooth it was almost appalling.

First he killed the drivers, then he allowed himself the luxury of picking out a diversity of targets, even killing a struggling terrorist for no other reason than to spare the burning man an agonizing death. Once he saw a terrified and panicked gray-bearded elder desperately attempting to work the buttons on his sat phone. Hawkins used the 4-power magnification of his PSO-1 telescopic sight to put a single 7.62 mm round from his Dragunov SVD through the man’s thick, low forehead.

Blood rushed like a river from a cracked dam as the man crumpled and fell away, his satellite phone dropping to the ground from lifeless fingers.

“On ropes!” McCarter shouted.

Both Encizo and James fired their second volley and Phoenix Force prepared to launch its final assault on the convoy.

CHAPTER FIVE

Dominican Republic

The cabdriver was skilled and as interested in avoiding trouble as Able Team. He circumnavigated the trouble spots and police checkpoints throughout the city until he was able to drop them off within blocks of their objective.

Moving quickly down narrow alleys and across vacant lots, Lyons led the team by as surreptitious a route as possible under the circumstances. The U.S. government safehouse was a single-bedroom walkup in an older building set above a fruit warehouse.

The locals watched them with open curiosity, and Lyons noticed the prolific presence of machetes immediately.

“Blending in is going to be a problem,” Schwarz noted, voice dry.

“You think?” Blancanales replied, equally sarcastic.

“Could be one of the problems our missing agent had,” Lyons pointed out.

“Only in the tourist-heavy areas would he have been able to blend in,” Schwarz agreed. “Screw it, we ain’t gonna be invisible so we might as well get inside and gear up.”

“True,” Lyons said. “I was tired of all this sneaking around anyway.”

Blancanales rolled his eyes in humor as the team crossed the busy street and approached the outside staircase leading to the safehouse.

Lyons’s apprehension grew as he moved closer to the building. If elements within the Dominican government were responsible for the agent’s disappearance, then they would have the resources to keep the location under surveillance.

Seeming to read his mind as they crossed the cracked sidewalk, Blancanales spoke up. “According to the Farm, this place isn’t believed to be compromised.”

“Virginia is a long way from here,” Lyons replied evenly, his eyes searching the rooftops.

From a few blocks over there was a sudden burst of weapons fire, and in response the crowd loitering on the street grew animated.

“Fuck it,” Schwarz said. “A police patrol could come by at any minute. We need to get out of sight for a while.”

“Let’s go.” Lyons turned his head and spit. “Just to be safe, Pol,” he said, “why don’t you hang at the bottom of the stair while we check the place out—watch our six, see if anything shakes loose.”

“You got it, amigo,” Blancanales said.

The former Green Beret peeled off from his friends and wandered down toward the end of a foul-smelling alley toward where an ancient Chevy flatbed delivery truck was parked next to a row of overflowing garbage cans.

Lyons walked forward. The staircase was an ancient, weathered structure obviously decades old. It ran up a story then doubled back under a covered flight of steps, where it ended at an awning-overhung porch. The door set there was dark. From inside the alley the sounds of the street, of automobiles, conversations and blaring radios was muted and sounded farther away by some trick of acoustics.

Lyons moved up the staircase slowly, making little noise. Taking his lead, Schwarz followed his example. Below them Blancanales glanced up, established their position, then scanned the area for signs of trouble.

At the door Lyons paused and looked down. He frowned at what he saw and ran a finger over the door latch, noting the scratches obvious on the faceplate. His proximity sense clanged like a submarine klaxon.

He turned his head on a neck as muscled as a professional boxer’s and put one big, thick finger to his lips in warning. Schwarz nodded once, hand poised on the railing. With his other he alerted Blancanales that something was amiss.

Carl Lyons reached out slowly and pushed against the unlatched door. It swung open to reveal a short, dark entranceway. The light of the setting Caribbean sun pushed a cluster of shadows backward. From farther within the apartment the Able Team operatives heard the slight sound of movement. Lyons closed his right hand into a massive rock-hard fist and stepped softly forward.

Schwarz slid slowly forward behind Lyons, turning sideways into a loose karate stance. Moving quietly, the two men penetrated the apartment safehouse. Schwarz saw a modestly furnished but modern space. It boasted a flat-screen television on a far wall next to a window, curtains drawn, which faced the street outside. The TV was the center piece of a loose half circle of furniture including a couch and chairs next to a pedestrian dining set.

Beyond that space was a small kitchen, and running past the open service areas of the apartment was a hallway, leading, presumably to bedrooms and living spaces in the rear of the government residence.

Just behind a closed door down the hallway the sounds of movement were clearly audible now. Schwarz pulled his face into a frowning mask. Common sense suggested that if the intruder was Dominican police or intelligence, the perpetrator would not have inserted without backup.

Having discovered no one serving overwatch either outside the building or inside, all indications pointed toward some other unknown and likely criminal actor. Which raised a lot more questions than it answered, both Lyons and Schwarz realized. They also realized common sense dictated that their unseen adversaries would be equipped with firearms.

Walking heel-toe and rolling their weight forward to avoid making any noise, the two men tested the floor-boards for telltale squeaks before each step. From behind the closed door all movement suddenly ceased. Instantly the hyperprimed commandos froze, ears straining to catch any sound.

The figure came through the doorway like a hurricane touching shore. The door flew open, triggering immediate action from Lyons and Schwarz. Schwarz twisted and dived, rolling over one shoulder and out of the hall. He came to his feet like an acrobat and reached for one of the wooden dining-room chairs standing near at hand.

Reacting without thinking, Carl Lyons sprang forward and off to one side, desperately trying to create and exploit an angle in the tight kill box of the narrow apartment hallway.

The figure swung around the frame of the open door in a swift buttonhook maneuver. Lyons had an impression of a short dark figure with a slight build, hands wrapped around the butt of a black automatic pistol.

He struck the hardwood floor, spun over one shoulder and came up inside the interloper’s extended arm. He twisted at the waist as he rose and lashed out with his arm, striking the figure’s nearest elbow with a heel-of-the-palm strike.

The grunt was feminine, and Lyons was stunned to realize his assailant was female. His strike threw her arms to the side and the hands holding a Glock pistol struck the wall. He reacted instantly, striking downward with a knife-edge blow that hammered into the woman’s wrist and knocked the gun to the floor.

With surprising reflexes the perpetrator spun and slammed a knee into the ex–LAPD detective’s groin. He rolled one of his thighs inward to block the blow. Fingers raked at his eyes. He responded with a windmilling block followed by a straight punch like a power jab.

The woman threw herself backward, avoiding the blow easily. She catapulted into the bedroom she’d just emerged from. Lyons surged forward, following hard on her heels. She did a back handstand, then came down in a crouch. Her hands flew to where her pant leg met the top of her dark hiking boot.

Realizing she was grabbing for a holdout weapon, Lyons scrambled to close the difference. Even as he lunged he knew he wasn’t going to make it in time. The figure came out of her crouch with a silver Detonics .45-caliber automatic in her gloved hands.

Kyrgyzstan

ENEMY VEHICLES FLARED like bonfires in violent conflagrations. Gary Manning raked the milling al Qaeda combatants with his machine gun as Hawkins methodically executed every gunman who came into his crosshairs.

Having used RPGs to disable every vehicle in the convoy, both Calvin James and Rafael Encizo traded their rocket launchers for Soviet-era submachine guns. Moving quickly under the cover fire, David McCarter prepared to lead the assault element down the cliff face to overwhelm any resistance.

“Move! Move! Move!” McCarter barked.

As one, the three-man fire team surged forward over the lip of the incline. The deployed lines were flung out in front of them. They ran face-first in an Australian-style rappel down the steep incline, one hand running the guideline, the other firing their weapons from the hip using a sling over the shoulder of their firing hand to steady the muzzle.

The loose gravel gave way in miniature avalanches under their feet as they sprinted down, the incline ropes whizzing through the gloves on their hand. The light from burning vehicles cast wild shadows and threw pillars of heat up toward them. It felt as if they were running straight into the open mouth of hell.

A figure with an AKM assault rifle appeared out of the smoke. Encizo shifted his muzzle across his front and caught the man with a short burst in the torso, putting him down. Without missing a stride, the Cuban-American combat diver vaulted the body and came off his rope onto the road.

McCarter ran up beside him, his AKS nestled in his shoulder and spitting bullets with a staccato burst. Another bearded terrorist absorbed the burst and crumpled. James came off his rope and took up his sector of fire, providing security on the far flank.

“Be advised,” Barbara Price’s voice cut in. “We have too much ground smoke and ambient heat for orbital imagery. We have no eyes at the moment.”

“Copy,” McCarter acknowledged. He turned toward Encizo and James. “Let’s start at the lead vehicle and work our way down.”

From above them Manning’s machine gun had fallen silent. Hawkins’s sniper rifle barked once, then was still.

At every vehicle they found dead terrorists and burning corpses. The ambush had been unleashed with brutal efficiency, leaving no survivors after the initial assault. Satisfied, McCarter informed Stony Man, then called his overwatch element down to the road.

“We’re ready for phase bravo,” he said simply. A burning truck at his back cast his sharp features in a slightly diabolical light. “Form up and let’s roll.”

Immediately, Phoenix Force formed a loose Ranger file, each soldier putting twenty yards between themselves. Calvin James, in the lead, took a GPS reading, noted the time and then set out up the center of the road at a fast clip.

For the next phase of the operation Phoenix Force would conduct an overland march for movement to target. To keep cover of darkness, they would have to maintain a tight pace. Their margin of error had been whittled down to a very slender gap.

In the hands of the IMU terrorists was an American contractor tasked with controlling Predator drones in the border region.

With terrorist reinforcements stopped while still en route, Phoenix Force was now prepared to make the overland hike to the location and free the American contractor who was being held hostage.

James set a rugged pace, leading the men straight up the road until they had crested the rise and started down the other side. Using a pace count perfected over long years of patrol and special reconnaissance missions he led them three miles before reorientating himself and cutting cross-country.

Following James’s navigation, while McCarter doubled checked the GPS landmarks, Phoenix Force cut across the rugged terrain. As they dropped in altitude from the high mountain pass, sparse vegetation gave way to temperate forest. Saw grass and chokeberry bushes became interspersed with stands of thick dogwood and copses of coniferous trees, providing good cover for their movements as they drew closer to their target.

Finally, James called a halt at the team’s predetermined rally point. The group huddled close together in the lee of a stand of tamarack pines. Below them an adobe-style walled compound was set on a stretch of valley floor in the middle of a small village. The road they had followed for part of their insertion after the ambush cut in from the west and ran directly through the hamlet. This late at night the only lights showing came from the compound. Overhead a low-pressure front had rolled in and stacked up like dirty cotton candy against the mountains.

Hawkins adjusted the ambient light levels on the passive receiver of his sniper scope, bringing the compound into a starker relief. Beside him Gary Manning had swapped out his night-vision goggles for IR binoculars, allowing him greater ocular clarity of the target site.

“I got three sentries,” the Canadian muttered softly.

“That’s my count,” Hawkins confirmed. “Two at the east-facing driveway gate and one walking the wall to the rear of the compound.”

McCarter keyed his com set. “You still have eyes or has the pressure front cut us off?”

“Be advised,” Price replied immediately, “cloud cover has obscured our imagery.”

“Understood.” McCarter clicked off. “Any sign of the hostage?”

“Negative,” Hawkins said.

“If the intel is spot-on, then he’s down in the basement,” Manning added, still scanning the scene with his IR binoculars.

“Shaking thing to bet a life on,” James said.

“I agree,” McCarter replied. “I think we’re going to have infiltrate silent and identify before we commence with the takedown.”

“The approaches are rough, just like the satellite showed. Coming down the hill on the far side will bring a damn avalanche down with us,” Encizo put in.

“Yep,” McCarter agreed. “I was hoping once we got on location we’d catch a break.” He eyed the steep terrain surrounding them and funneling downward toward the terrorist compound and village. It was unforgiving. “But it looks like our luck is holding true to form.”

“Straight down the road?” James asked.

“Straight down the road,” McCarter answered.

Dominican Republic

CARL LYONS FLUNG himself to one side, and the Detonics Combat Master went off like a hand cannon in the confined space. The heavy .45-caliber slug snapped through the air and burned down the hallway before burying itself in a wall.

Hermann Schwarz spun around the wall and threw the chair in a rough lob. It arced out and landed, bouncing awkwardly. The interloper jerked back, flinching away from the flying furniture.

Lyons used the seconds to readjust himself and leap onto the masked figure. His hand caught her wrist just behind where the gun butt filled her palm. He surged forward, snapping his elbow around and driving it into the side of her head.

The masked female slumped under the blow, stunned. The compact automatic dropped out of her hand and fell loudly on the floor. Schwarz rushed into the room ready to back Lyons up. He looked down and saw the sprawled figure on the floor as Lyons pushed himself up.

“She go night-night?” he asked.

“Like a baby,” Lyons replied, and picked up the pistol.

Out in the front room they heard the door being thrown open violently. Lyons spun and lifted his handgun.

“We’re fine, Pol,” Schwarz called out.

“Glad to hear it,” Blancanales replied. “Guess I jumped to the wrong conclusion after seeing you walk into a building right before there’s a gunshot.” Blancanales walked in and looked down at the unconscious figure on the ground. “Dios mios, Ironman, we don’t have time for you to start dating.”

“You’re getting to be a real old lady,” Lyons muttered.

“Speaking of ladies,” Schwarz said, “maybe we could ask this one some questions?”

“Suits me.” Lyons nodded, and stuck the gun behind his back. “Let’s get her up and put her in a chair.”

Blancanales took her mask off to check the extent of Lyons’s blow, and an attractive woman with mahogany skin and Caribbean features was revealed. Her head was covered with close-cropped, tight-knit rows of dark hair pulled back severely from her handsome face. Her temple was swelling where it had made contact with the sharp end of Lyons’s elbow.

The woman came awake, still dazed while the three men pushed her down into a deep, comfortable chair in the living room that was so soft it would be impossible to quickly rise from. She sought to argue and perhaps fight, but Lyons laconically showed her her own pistol and she sat quietly, shooting daggers with her eyes.

“Anything?” Lyons asked after Blancanales had finished searching her.

The Puerco Rican nodded and held up empty hands. “Nothing.”

Lyons nodded. “Check the room she was tossing,” he instructed.

The big ex-cop regarded his prisoner while Blancanales moved back to the bedroom where they had first jumped the thief. Schwarz moved behind the woman and took her hands up, rolling her fingers across a glass he had taken from the kitchen, then setting it just out of reach on the table.

The woman squawked in protest at the liberty taken and spit out a long line of vulgarities. Lyons smirked in admiration at her profane grasp of the English language.

“Nice. You kiss your mother with that mouth?”

“My mother’s dead, you Yaquis pig-screwing bastard!” the woman snapped.

Lyons didn’t believe her for a second. “Everyone’s got a hard luck story, sister. What’s your name?”

“None of your business.”

“Sure, you break into the house of my friend, try to steal stuff, and it’s none of my business. But that’s fine, little girl, we’ll know who you are in a moment.”

At the kitchen table Schwarz was quickly mixing a small amount of commercial glue taken from desk supplies in the apartment with common tap water. He worked methodically while the computer next to him began warming up.

“Where’s your badge?” the woman demanded, trying to turn the tables.

Lyons smiled at her and lifted one big, blunt finger to his lips. “Sshh. You felt my badge upside your head just a minute ago.”

“Someone will have heard that pistol shot,” she warned. “They will call the police.”

“In this neighborhood? In the middle of a riot? For a car backfire?” Lyons shook his head gently and the girl slumped into the chair.

Blancanales came back into the room carrying a black canvas backpack. “She found the safe,” he said, and dumped her pack out onto the table next to where Schwarz was working.

“She crack it?” Lyons demanded.

“Nope, but she would have,” Blancanales answered. “I found this.”

The Puerto Rican Special Forces veteran lifted out a black electronic device the size of a commercial Pocketbook computer with two coaxial cables dangling from it. The implement was a top-of-the-line digital safecracker. Lyons let out a long, slow whistle of appreciation.

“That’s not exactly gear I would associate with a common street burglar,” he said.

The woman looked away. From the kitchen table behind her Schwarz scanned his fingerprint sample into the safehouse computer. “I’m sending it through now,” he said into his com link.

The Stony Man supercomputers would compute a match at speeds that far outstripped the power of the field station equipment.

“Why don’t you save me some time, lady,” Lyons snapped. “No one’s buying the burglar act.”

“Who are you?” the woman asked, voice steady.

Lyons opened his mouth to reply but was interrupted by Schwarz, the man’s voice thick with sardonic irony.

“Who are we, Ms. Felicity Castillo?” Schwarz laughed. “As of now, we’re your contacts.” He turned toward Lyons. “She’s one of ours.”

Lyons got a look of disgust on his face. “I already hate this fucking town.”

CHAPTER SIX

Kyrgyzstan

“Phoenix to Stony Man,” McCarter said. There was only silence in answer. Surprised by the lack of response, McCarter put his finger up against his communications device, tapping it slightly. “Stony?” he repeated.

There was still no answer. He looked over to where Calvin James squatted in the dark, weapon at the ready. James looked at him expectantly and the Briton nodded once.

“Phoenix to Stony,” James tried. The medic shook his head. “Nothing.”

Each of the remaining team members attempted to make contact, but none of their geo-sat uplinks were working. In the space of a heartbeat Phoenix Force found itself cut off from the outside world.

McCarter turned toward the hulking form of Gary Manning. “Jammer?”

The big Canadian Special Forces veteran nodded his head slowly. “Sure. It’s possible. But it’d have to be a little more upscale than we’d expect from a crew of local clowns like the ones we’re supposed to hit. I suppose it’s just as possible we have low-earth-orbit interference.”

“The plot deepens,” Encizo muttered.

“We still going to make the meet?” Hawkins asked.

McCarter nodded. “I’ll put Hawkins out on flank in an overwatch position. Manning will move forward, then set up the machine gun for a secondary angle of fire. The rest of us will go in paranoid.”

“Let’s do it,” James agreed.

Phoenix Force moved out in a slow accordion formation toward their RZ, or rendezvous point. U.S. intelligence had set up a meeting with a local indigenous asset who would provide them with materials and transportation their rapid response infiltration had made impossible to bring with them.

In this case a local smuggler friendly to Western money had agreed to supply them with a heavy-bodied diesel engine truck of the type used by local military units. Calvin James carried a fanny pack filled with local currency in the sum of eighteen thousand U.S. dollars.

Such pay-to-play operations were inherently dangerous for obvious reasons, but were common in tribal regions removed from the influence of a centralized government. Cold hard cash had become as much of a tool in the paramilitary operators’ arsenal as carbines and shape charges.

The three-man fire team consisting of McCarter, James and Encizo slid into position behind a screen of sturdy mountain shrubs with oily, cold-resistant leaves and sticklike branches. Ahead of them they saw the old truck sitting beside the dirt road that eventually led into town.

The night was silent except for the wind through the pines. Nothing moved out beyond their perimeter. McCarter lifted his weapon and utilized his night scope in precise patterns, covering vectors in a methodical manner. He could detect no sign of obvious human presence.

James leaned in close and whispered into the Briton’s ear. “You see the driver door is open?”

McCarter nodded. A bar of shadow separated the gloomy metal gray of the door from the body of the cab. The hair on the back of the ex–SAS commando’s neck began to rise in almost preternatural warning.

“Feeling hinky,” he muttered.

“Big time,” James agreed.

Encizo shifted his weight and leaned in toward the other men. “I’ll slide up and check it out.”

McCarter frowned as he realized the exposure the man was vulnerable to, but then nodded. If the plan was going to unfold, they needed the truck. Giving up on the truck at this juncture meant giving up on the hostage. He wasn’t willing to do that until he had exhausted every possibility.

Encizo carefully rotated his Soviet-era submachine gun around on its sling until it hung muzzle down across his back. He pulled his silenced pistol from a shoulder holster on his web gear and silently disappeared into the dark.

McCarter waited patiently, James at his side. The two men scanned the darkness as clouds began to gather overhead, further obscuring the terrain. Long, tense minutes later James quietly nudged McCarter with his elbow.

The Phoenix Force leader turned away from his survey of the far side of the roads and watched the dark shadow of Rafael Encizo slide out of the ditch next to the back of the truck. Both men gripped their weapons tightly.

Encizo moved like water flowing over the ground, staying low to present a subdued silhouette as he edged toward the front of the big truck. Carefully using his free hand to peel back the canvas tarp covering the cargo bed of the five-ton vehicle, he held his position, peering inside. Satisfied, he gently lowered the edge of the tarp back into place and crept forward.

Moving in silent increments he approached the open door to the vehicle cab. The blunt muzzle of his pistol silencer led the way like a hunting dog on point. He reached up with his free hand and made contact with the truck, checking for trip wires or other obvious booby traps.

Suddenly he put a combat foot on the running board and stepped up, swinging the door open and leveling the pistol. Behind him McCarter and James tensed, mentally prepared for a sudden hellstorm of gunfire.

Encizo froze for a moment in the open doorway, his broad-shouldered back orientated toward his teammates, making it impossible for them to see past him. After a long, pregnant pause, the Cuban turned and hauled something out of the truck before jumping down.

McCarter swore silently as he saw the limp body strike the hard-packed dirt road like a sack of loose meat. His eyes ran over the corpse with an expert forensic eye. The head was obviously concave on one side, either from a point-blank firearm shot or some blunt instrument.

If the ambush was going to come it was going to come now, he realized. His finger took up the slack on the smooth metal curve of his trigger. Beside him he felt James stiffen in readiness. Across the little clearing Encizo had taken a knee with his back to the truck. His pistol was back in its holster and his submachine gun was now up and ready in his hands.

Nothing happened.

Slowly, McCarter felt his adrenaline begin to bleed off as they weren’t hit. After a minute he tapped James. When the ex-SEAL turned toward him he gave the man the hand-and-arm signal for a perimeter sweep. Instantly, James stepped backward into the tree at the bottom of the defilade and began a 360-degree search of the rendezvous zone.

McCarter rose into a crouch and jogged over to where Encizo waited by the corpse. The bulk of the ancient five-ton truck loomed above them. As he drew closer he saw the bloody hole that filled the left side of their contact’s face.

If a bullet had entered through the driver’s window it would have struck the truck occupant in just such a fashion, he realized.

“Is this our guy?” Encizo asked him.

“Don’t know,” McCarter whispered back. “We had location, time and code exchanges.”

Both men turned at the same time, weapons ready. Calvin James appeared in front of them, then squatted. “It’s clear out to seventy-five yards in these woods. Beyond that anyone watching us would either be down the road or up in elevation.”

Encizo got up and investigated the vehicle cab as McCarter shook the corpse down for any useful information. James, a trained medic and forensic investigator, performed a cursory inspection of the major head wound.

“Low velocity, larger caliber.”

“Pistol?”

“Almost certainly. Maybe one of your favorites—a Browning Hi-Power or even a .45 with a silencer.”

“How can you tell a silencer?” McCarter asked as he pulled several items out of the dead man’s clothes.

“Can’t be one hundred percent sure,” James admitted. “But the entrance wound was pretty damn traumatic for there to be no exit wound. That suggests a soft-nosed slug with a subsonic load.”

“High-end electronic jammers and silencer kills?” McCarter grumbled. “We stepping on someone else’s toes?”

“Chinese?” James offered.

“Chinese gear beating Bear’s electronics?” McCarter shook his head. “Not a chance.”

“Curioser and curioser,” James replied.

“Hey, guys,” Encizo said from the cab. “Get a load of this.”

Dominican Republic

THE WOMAN SPUN in the chair, obviously surprised by Schwarz’s revelation.

The Stony Man operative smirked back at her. “Let’s keep it simple,” the Able Team electronics genius said. “Skip your transient codes and go right to your mother parole.” He paused, then said, “India Delta Six.”

The woman, tension draining from her limbs, frowned and sighed. “Delta India Nine,” she replied.

“I was almost shot by one of our own stringers?” Lyons demanded. “Christ, that happens too often. Fine. Where the hell’s Smith?”

The woman turned back and looked at him. “I don’t know. He never showed up to our meet. I went to the secondary rendezvous and he didn’t show for that, either. I began to suspect the security service for the government had realized he was more than a law-enforcement liaison and did away with him.”

“So you broke into this place?” Schwarz asked.

“I’ve been here before,” she replied. “It seemed the most obvious place he would have kept information about me. I wanted to erase my trail before internal security followed up on me.”

“What was the last thing he was working on?” Lyons demanded.

“A meet for tonight with a middleman for some third party. Maybe about drugs, maybe weapons. Either way he thought it would get him a lead into which elements within this regime were working both sides of the street.”

Lyons frowned, locked eyes with Schwarz over the top of the woman’s head. “I guess we know where we go next,” he said. Schwarz nodded.

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

INSIDE THE computer center, Professor Huntington Wethers let out a long, low whistle and set his cold pipe down on the desktop next to his keyboard. A tall, laconic black man with almost gaunt features and salt-and-pepper hair, he was the ultimate academic.

He preformed his tasks of research, logistics and information networking with methodical, almost mechanical efficiency. He was not an artist making wild leaps of intuition like his younger counterpart on the cyberteam, Akira Tokaido. Rather he crossed his t’s and dotted his i’s like a probate lawyer until every fact or isolated bit of information was accounted for and placed neatly into its appropriate box before being checked off.

Wethers made connections, he found links, he built bridges one binary bit at a time between data streams until scrambled mosaics became crystal-clear pictures. In his usual understated way, he had made another connection.

“Bear?” Wethers asked over one bony shoulder.

From beside the bubbling coffeepot where he was assembling a table of organizational equipment for the field teams Kurtzman looked up. “Go ahead, Hunt,” he growled. “You got something?”

“I have a rather odd connection between what our teams are doing,” Wethers answered.

Curiosity piqued, Kurtzman maneuvered his wheelchair out from behind his desk and toward the former college professor. “Between the Caribbean and central Asia? A connection? Do tell.”

“Could be a fluke,” Wethers warned. “One of those odd coincidences people use to justify a belief in fate.”

Kurtzman rolled up next to him and grunted. “No such thing as coincidences in our world. What do you have?”

“Our missing FBI agent in Santo Domingo and our missing contractor in Kyrgyzstan?”

“Okay?”

“They’re brothers.”

Carmen Delahunt burst into the room through the door leading to the communications center. “We’ve got a problem,” she said without preamble. “We just lost our uplink with Phoenix.”

“Weather?” Kurtzman asked.

“Weather shouldn’t have been a problem. I ran a forensic diagnostic on the signal and I got shadow chatter in the low-end megahertz range.”

“Crap,” Kurtzman swore.

“High-end jammers,” Wethers agreed.

Kyrgyzstan

MCCARTER MOVED IN a crouch through the graveyard. Behind him three other members of Phoenix Force were spread out in a loose wedge formation, weapons up. Above them, hidden on the ridge, Hawkins tracked their progress from a sniper overwatch position.

McCarter dodged in and out of headstones, skirting graves torn open by artillery rounds. He averted his gaze from mummified husks of old corpses and tried not step on any of the skeletal remains that lay scattered like children’s toys. Rafael Encizo muttered something low and in Spanish under his breath as his foot came down in a spot of a decomposing corpse.

In five minutes everything had gone to shit.

The high-altitude wind had stacked eastern storm clouds up on the elevated geography behind them and a cold rain had begun to fall. In the same instant contact with their communication satellite had vanished. Then as they made their initial approach into the village they had realized a battle had just occurred within the small populated area.

They were now operating blindly in an extremely hazardous environment. The thought of abandoning the mission had never been discussed. There was still a hostage out there in the middle of this mess.

The falling rain was a blanket of white noise. The Phoenix Force warriors remained ghostly figures as they traversed the cemetery. The weight of their weapons were reassuring in their hands. They breathed in the humid air, feeding their bodies through the exertion.

The first rifle crack was muted and distant. McCarter went down to one knee behind a headstone. Instantly, James did the same, followed by Manning and Encizo.

The Briton strained his ears against the muffling effect of the heavy rain. He heard another single shot of rifle caliber. A burst of submachine gun fire answered it, and McCarter saw the flash of muzzle fire flare out of the dark rectangle of a window in the second story of a compound ahead of them.

McCarter quickly ascertained that none of the fire was being directed toward their position.

“What the hell is going on?”

“Internal coup for command?” James offered in a whisper. “Could be a blood feud, I guess. Everything is tribal politics this far up in the mountains.”

McCarter nodded. “Let’s try to use the chaos to our advantage.”

They were about fifty yards from the edge of the settlement where thatch and mud hovels surrounded the more built-up areas in a loose ring broken by animal pens. McCarter wiped rain water out of his eyes and looked toward the irrigation ditch that had been his original infiltration route.

He scowled. He wasn’t bursting with anticipation to slide into the muddy, waist-deep water of the ditch. Another burst of submachine gun fire came from the compound’s second story and was answered by two controlled single shots.

He rose from behind the headstone and began moving toward the village proper. Behind him his teammates rose and followed, keeping their formation loose and broken but still maintaining overlapping fields of fire.

The team dodged the open graves, artillery craters and headstones like runners navigating hurdles on the quarter-mile track. The soaked ground swallowed up the impact of their footsteps, spraying water with every step they took.

McCarter reached the round wall of a mud hovel and went around one side of it. He peeked out and saw an unpaved alley running deeper into the village. Bullet holes riddled the wall of one long, low, mud-brick building. A mongrel lay, shot dead, in the weeds beside it.

“I’m going to move forward then wave you up once it’s clear,” he instructed James. The ex-SEAL nodded as Encizo and Manning took up defensive positions to secure the Briton’s infiltration.

McCarter pushed forward. The alley ran past the back of the compound several blocks up. Trash bins lay overturned in the muddy street and rubbish was heaped everywhere. McCarter stayed close to one side of the building and edged his way carefully into the street. His eyes squinted against the rain, searching windows and doorways for any sign of movement.

There was no more gunfire. The rain was even louder adjacent to the structures of the village. It hammered onto shanty roofs of corrugated tin and ran off into makeshift gutters, forming rushing waterfalls that splashed out into the street every few yards. McCarter wiped water from his eyes and stalked farther into the tangle of dank and twisting streets.

He crossed an open area between two one-story buildings and sensed motion. He spun, bringing up his carbine. A black-and-white goat on the end of a frayed rope looked up and bleated at him. The little animal’s fur was matted down with exposure to the rain. There was a little hutch built behind the staked goat. From the doorway of the hutch a slender arm and hand sprawled in the mud. There was a bracelet of hammered metal around the delicate wrist and the fingers had frozen in rigor mortis.

McCarter looked up the street in both directions but saw nothing. He crouched and reached across with his left hand to his right boot and pulled a Gerber Guardian straight blade from his boot sheath. He stepped into the pen, ignoring the squish of mud and shit in the straw under his feet.

The animal bleated again and McCarter shushed it reflexively. He reached down and slid the double-edged blade into the loop of twine around the animal’s neck. He flicked his wrist and severed the rope. The goat walked to the edge of the pen and began munching on the straw that had been out of its reach before.

McCarter slowly sank to one knee. He slid the Gerber back into its boot sheath and bent forward, looking into the hutch. The shadows were deep in the tiny space. He saw the arm running back into the dark. McCarter blinked and the shadow resolved into the shape of a woman.

She was young and dead, with opaque eyes staring out at him. There was a bloody open gash in her forehead where a bullet had punched in. He looked away.

McCarter rose slowly out of his crouch. He heard a man call out several streets over and he froze. The language was French. Someone farther out from that answered him in the same language. Anger made McCarter grit his teeth. He swallowed a lump of bile that had formed like a rock in his throat.

Despite his anger he was more concerned by the mystery of the European voice. He had to keep his mind on the operation, focus his thoughts.

The men who had murdered this woman were human, just like him. They were killers, just like him. But they were nothing like him, nor he anything like them. To reduce violence to an evil unto itself, without regard to the circumstances that spawned it, was a philosophical arrogance McCarter could not stomach.

Securing his grip on the butt of his pistol, he walked over to the edge of the animal pen between the two houses and looked out into the narrow street. The incessant rain dimpled the puddles with the weight of its falling drops. He opened a little gate and stepped out into the street, leaving it open behind him.

He crouched, turned and made eye contact with James, who nodded. As his Phoenix Force colleagues shuffled forward behind him he hunted the darkness for unfamiliar shapes. The team had stumbled onto the middle of something, he knew, and he needed to get a handle on it and fast.

Once Phoenix Force was in position he began to move toward the compound, walking quickly with his weapon ready. He reached the edge of a round, one-story silo and looked carefully around it. A short passageway between buildings linked the main street with the secondary alley McCarter now navigated.

About twenty yards down a man stood with his back to McCarter. The ex–SAS commando narrowed his eyes in suspicion. The man wasn’t dressed like a rough mountain tribesman. He wore a night suit bristling with all the paraphernalia and accoutrements of the modern special-operations soldier. For some reason only night-vision goggles were missing.

McCarter lifted his carbine in a slow, smooth gesture. He straightened his arm and placed the sights squarely on the occipital lobe of the terrorist soldier’s skull. His finger curled around the trigger of the carbine and took up the slack.

The combatant looked to his left and lifted a fist above his head in some prearranged signal. McCarter shuffled sideways across the narrow mouth of the alley, his weapon tracking the man’s back with every step as he moved.

Once on the other side of the alleyway, McCarter slid around a corner and put his back against the wall and turned his face back toward the dirt lane he had just crossed. He drew the Beretta 92-F in an even, deliberate motion. He held the pistol up so that the muzzle was poised beside the hard plane of his cheek bone. He bent slightly at the knee and crouched before risking a glance around the edge of the building.

He looked over to where James was crouched motionless behind cover. He put a finger to his lips in a pantomime for quiet then pointed at his own eyes and at the European operative. James nodded once.

McCarter prepared for his kill.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Dominican Republic

The sawmill squatted on the banks of the Ozama River. Silent as a mausoleum, the building stood surrounded by warehouses and industrial structures now fallen dark, or burned to rubble in the wake of successive riots and civil unrest. Rain fell, dirty gray from the sky.

Rosario Blancanales drew his mouth into a tight line. He scanned the building and the area around it through his night-vision goggles, searching for telltale smeary silhouettes in the monochromatic green of the high-tech device. He saw nothing. The sounds of traffic came to him from the other areas of the city, muted across the distance. Close by, his ears detected only the whisper of cold wind skipping across the polluted river.

Outfitted from the cache at the safehouse, Able Team had arrived at the meeting set up by the missing FBI agent.

Next to the Puerto Rican Special Forces veteran, Lyons scrutinized the building, determining his approach. To the rear of the building loading docks with big roll-up bay doors sat shut and locked.

On the side of the building closest to him stood a maintenance door set on a short flight of concrete steps. Off in the distance, Lyons heard the soft thump-thump of a relief agency helicopter cruising low over the city.

Lyons again scanned the area through his goggles.

Santo Domingo was a city locked down under martial law, threatened by civil unrest and criminal gangs threatening to overrun their squalid ghettos. Police units patrolled in armored personnel carriers, and army checkpoints secured every major road and highway leading into the city.

Able Team had taken a grave risk by going armed into the streets of a supposedly allied nation dealing with the threat of a violent insurrection. An insurrection with increasingly apparent ties to the worldwide narcotics syndicates. Moving incognito had proved nearly impossible.

Lyons moved forward, scrambling out of the empty drainage ditch running parallel to the abandoned sawmill’s main building. He approached a chain-link fence and dropped down, removing wire cutters from his combat harness. With deft, practiced movements Lyons snipped an opening and bent back one edge.

Blancanales held the wire up while Schwarz remained outside the building to provide security and surveillance.

Lyons slid through head first and popped up on the other side. Blancanales crawled through and they began their approach. Traveling in a wide crescent designed to take them as far as possible from the silent street, Lyons approached the single maintenance entrance on the building’s side. He scanned the triple row of windows set above the building’s ground floor for any sign of movement. As he neared the building Lyons pulled a Glock 17 from his shoulder rig. The weapon had come from the safehouse armory but was not his first choice in handguns.

Lyons crab-walked up the short flight of concrete stairs leading to the door, clicking the selector switch off safety on his pistol as he moved. Behind him Blancanales tracked the muzzle of his own pistol through zones of fire.

Reaching the door, Lyons pulled a lock-pick gun from a cargo pocket and slid it expertly home into the lock as Blancanales maintained security.

The ex–LAPD detective squeezed the trigger on the lock device and heard the bolt securing the door snap back. Replacing the lock-pick gun, Lyons put a hand on the door, holding his 9 mm pistol up and ready. He looked over at Blancanales, who nodded wordlessly.

Before he moved, Lyons took a final scan of his surroundings. The industrial wasteland was eerily still. Taking a breath, he turned the handle and pulled open the door.

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

BARBARA PRICE CRADLED her phone next to her ear and took the clipboard and pen from the Farm’s head of security, a former Marine, Buck Greene. On the other end of the com link Hal Brognola queried Price further.

“There has to be more than that, Barb,” he said.

“I know, Hal,” she said into the phone. Signing the requisition form, she nodded once to Greene and handed the clipboard back. “We don’t have any other connection besides the fact that the two men were brothers. No other link. Just seems strange.”

“All right,” Brognola relented. “I’ll call the director and see if anything about the man’s brother came forward during the agent’s security background checks.”

“Great,” Price said. “When you get it, just shoot it to Delahunt on her email. We’ll feed it into Wethers’s search from there. I was thinking that for the brother to get his job as a civilian contractor flying those drones he had to have been in the military, right? Air Force or Army.”

Seeing where she was going, Brognola grunted his agreement. “Right. I’ll check to see if the other brother had some military time before joining the FBI. But how are we doing with commo for Phoenix Force?”

“We’re almost positive it’s a high-end electronics jammer, but whose, we can’t say yet. Bear’s working on trying to get a relay station from Bagram he can para-drop in to try to outboost the hostile signal.” Price paused. “No promises, though.”

“Fine. Keep me up to date and I’ll try to shake something loose on these two brothers for you.”

“Thanks, Hal,” she said, and hung up.

Price looked down at the cell in her hand and frowned. Both Phoenix Force and Able Team had been scrambled at the last minute on these operations, a situation ripe for intervention by that bastard Murphy and his immutable law. There had been no time for advance homework or advance preparations, and she prayed to heaven it wasn’t going to cost her the lives of her men in the field.

Dominican Republic

LYONS STEPPED THROUGH the black mouth of the open door and into the darkened interior of the building. He shuffled smoothly to one side and sank into a tight crouch, pistol up. Blancanales stepped through and let the door swing shut behind him. Lyons quickly scanned the hall in both directions. It was empty. Rising, he began moving down the corridor toward the rear of the building. Covering their rear, Blancanales followed.

The sawmill was oppressively still and quiet around them. The perimeter hallway ran the length of the structure, with doors leading to the building’s interior spaced at intervals along the inside wall. At the far end of the hallway Lyons could make out the heavy steel of a fire door that would open up onto stairs.

The intelligence of the building layout had been spotty. Aaron Kurtzman had been unable to pull up engineer blueprints during his rushed info search. All Lyons knew was that according to Smith’s contact the FBI agent was supposed to tag along with a minor street crook and the man’s bodyguards to a meet in an office suite on the second floor.

The sound of his breath loud in his own ears, Lyons entered the stairwell. He craned his neck, looking upward. Nothing moved on the stairs or crouched in the gloomy landings. He tracked his scanning vision with the muzzle of the Glock 17. The hair on the back of Lyons’s neck stood up like the hackles of a dog.

Blancanales put his shoulder at a right angle to the big ex-cop’s back, his own weapon up.

There was a smell of dust and disuse hanging heavy in the air. Faintly beneath that was the slight odor of machine oil coming up from the sawmill floor. Lyons’s straining ears detected only the beating of his own heart. He placed the reinforced soles of his boots carefully on the first metal rung of the building’s skeletal framed staircase and began to climb.

He edged around the curve of the stair, Blancanales right behind him. The raised grip of the pistol’s butt tight in his palm, he kept his Weaver stance tight, ready to react to the slightest motion. Smith’s contact was an established veteran of life as a hunted man. Security this apparently lax was inexplicable in such a man.

Reaching the second-floor landing, Lyons snuggled up tight against the fire door on that level as Blancanales took a position. He pressed his back against wall beside the door handle. The seal of the landing door was too tight for him to use a fiber optics surveillance cable bore scope. The heavy steel door effectively muted any potential sound coming from the second-floor hallway.

Gritting his teeth, Lyons nodded once and Blancanales pulled open the door. The ex-cop darted his head around the edge. He was met with silence and darkness. The hallway ran for several yards, office doors on one side, dark windows facing the parking lot on the other. The hall turned in a L-break at the far end toward the front of the building.

Lyons moved down the center of the hallway, ready to drop prone or respond with deadly fire at the slightest threat. Behind him Blancanales edged into the hallway, weapon up.

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