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Extermination
Don Pendleton


When Stony Man is called to battle, the crisis is real and immediate. Cybernetics experts run logistics from the war room of a secret facility known only to the President.The commando teams of Able Team and Phoenix Force lead the ground fight–consummate soldiers dedicated to protecting the innocent. The world isn't aware of Stony Man, but Stony Man remains vigilant: guarding that fine line between hell and earth.Small farming towns across America, Europe and Asia have come under attack by a virulent new biochemical cocktail that induces the ravages of starvation in less than a day. The group behind it promises to decimate the human population unless its twisted demands are met by government heads. As this radical anti-industrial group launches its deadly countdown, Stony Man works feverishly to stop the horrifying plague from spreading–before a global megacull leaves only a handful of people to weep for the earth.









“KEEP THIS QUIET OR NO PART OF YOUR NATION WILL BE SPARED THE WRATH OF GREENWAR.”


“You must bid higher than your opponent. The opening bid is one-fifth of your nation’s population. Those willing to sacrifice the most people will survive total extinction. Those willing to resist will be completely exterminated.”

Bezoar smiled, though there was no mirth or warmth in it. “Have a nice day, sir.”

The video ended.

Brognola felt as if he had to scrub himself down. He’d only been watching for ten minutes, but the horror carried the weight of hours. He set down the small smartphone, plucked out a handkerchief and mopped his brow.

“They either have someone inside Homeland Security or they have good spies. Given the aerial footage…” the President began. He rested a hand on Brognola’s shoulder. “Stony Man is our only option. Bezoar is insane, asking for me to kill one in five people.”

The smartphone beeped. The two men looked at it.

It was a text message.

“France has a bid to kill one of every two of its citizens. Make up your mind quickly.”

The Oval Office fell silent as the specter of doom hung over the big Fed and the leader of the free world.





Extermination


America’s Ultra-Cover Intelligence Agency

Stony Man







Don Pendleton







www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)



Extermination




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 ONE


One of the things that Trooper Eugene Robespierre liked about the state he’d sworn to protect was that all of Iowa felt like a small town. He was one of less than four hundred state troopers who saw to the safety of the roads and supplemented local law enforcement. His Ford Crown Victoria was fifty miles out of Lansing, the end of Iowa Highway 9 and this current leg of his patrol. In Lansing he’d spell himself for the night before returning to the District 10 barracks back on Oelwein. This was a once-a-month roll for Robespierre, mainly because this corner of Iowa was quiet. The road twisted and bent to find the path of least resistance between the rippling hills and strips of farmland.

“Unit 327, Unit 327, call in,” his radio chirped.

Robespierre picked up the receiver. “I’m here, Janice. What’s going on?”

“We’ve got a call from the Allamakee Sheriff’s Department about a problem in the town of Albion,” the dispatcher, Janice Clayton, told him.

“Problem?” Robespierre asked.

“It seems like there’s a riot in Albion,” Clayton said.

Robespierre had never been near Albion, a quiet little stretch of farmland that had never boasted more than six hundred souls. The town had been so peaceful, the only reason he knew anything about it was that his best friend had been born and raised there, and railed about how absolutely boring the place had been.

“Riot,” he repeated. He was already turning back to the west. The computer beside him in the squad car was already determining the best route to Albion by GPS. From what Robespierre remembered, Albion was a place where everyone was well fed. It wasn’t in the cornfields of central Iowa, but this area still had pockets of farmland between rows of trees and the rolling hills. Some were conventional crop fields, but a few orchards were sprinkled here and there. Even as he gunned the engine, racing toward Albion, he noticed that something akin to a tornado had landed by the roadside.

He stomped on the brakes, skidding to a halt beside a fruit stand that had been assaulted. Broken, half-eaten fruit was scattered everywhere, and there were bodies littered among the mushy remains. Robespierre pulled his radio.

“Dispatch, we’ve got eight casualties at roadside, by marker 12,” the trooper called. He hit the dash computer, transmitting his GPS position to the barracks.

“We’re aware of them. All were announced DOA by the local sheriffs’ deputies,” Clayton replied.

“He left the bodies out here?” Robespierre asked, sliding out from behind the wheel to get a closer look. It might have been a trick of the light, or smears of mashed fruit, but a couple of the corpses on the ground looked as if bites had been taken out of them. Another body lay just outside the carnage of twisted corpses and pulped food. The man had been wearing flannel, the front of his shirt hanging in ragged strips where it had been torn by the unmistakable violence of a twelve-gauge shotgun. Unlike some of the others lying amid the ruins and carcasses, his face was fully visible. There was no apparent reason as to why he had been shot, except for the fact that his belly was distended to the point where shirt buttons around his stomach had popped off.

“The hell?” Robespierre muttered, hoping someone was out there who could give him an answer.

“Robey, you need to get to town,” Clayton replied. “The deputies are in deep shit. They need backup now!”

Robespierre turned back, but he had seen more that was unusual among the dead.

One of them, a young woman, had apparently asphyxiated trying to swallow gulps of squash. Her belly was distended, too, recalling the images of horror from Ethiopian and Somali droughts. The woman’s mouth and cheeks were stuffed with a choking mass of pulp, her crazed eyes wide with terror.

She’d literally eaten herself to death, and Robespierre looked to see half-eaten fruit scattered in a trail leading back to Albion. “How many deputies are on scene?”

“Three of them, but they’re running out of ammunition,” Clayton answered. “I’ve also diverted more troopers, but you might want to make sure you have easy access to your rifle.”

“Running out of ammo,” Robespierre repeated. “Are they in a restaurant or a grocery store?”

“Uh…no. A delivery truck, refrigerated, for produce,” Clayton said. “How did you know the call-in was about a food riot?”

“Because I saw the damage done at a roadside fruit stand,” Robespierre told her. “I don’t get it. There’s all kinds of food around, and these people are scrambling to down so much that they choke on it?”

He’d reached the rise of a hill and looked down on the small town of Albion. Bodies were strewed in the road running through the center of town, and fires had broken out in different corners of the little burg. Robespierre looked at the Smith & Wesson Military and Police 15 rifle locked into its dashboard rack. The weapon was one of the latest M-16 clones built by various companies foreign and domestic, but the M&P was the same “brand” as the .40-caliber pistol on his hip, so the Iowa state troopers had received a deal on both sidearms and patrol rifles. Robespierre had enjoyed shooting the MP-15; it was accurate and wasn’t prone to jamming like other M-16 knockoffs, but this would be the first time he’d have to utilize it in an actual fight.

Gunfire crackled in the distance, and from the sound of things, it was more than just a few deputies firing. This was a back-and-forth gunfight; no surprise here since rural communities and guns went hand-in-hand. Almost every household had a gun rack of some sort, and more than a couple had full-size safes. But these were sporting arms, legally purchased and owned, not the stolen outlaw arms that were smuggled into cities with weapons bans that only ended up disarming law-abiding citizens. Raging gun battles just didn’t happen in small, friendly communities where everyone had jobs and the means to support themselves.

But now, that had all changed, Robespierre realized. People were starving so badly that they risked shotgun blasts or gorged until their throats swelled and suffocated themselves. Now they were taking any means necessary to find a way to fill their starving gullets. That meant that someone between them and their food would have to die. Hunting rifles and shotguns might have been far too much for handgun-equipped deputies to deal with, unless starvation had been severely detrimental to their marksmanship.

Robespierre didn’t know what to expect, but he saw the refrigerated truck, bodies sprawled around in a battlefield of pure carnage. His Zeiss binoculars were sharp enough to give him a crystal clear view of the siege. Sweeping the scene, he saw one of the county deputy cars peppered with bullet holes. The fender hung off it like fluttering, ragged wallpaper, it had been blasted so ferociously. Deer-hunter rifles and 12-gauge buckshot were devastating against body armor, and even the fiberglass and metal of a squad car could be weakened so drastically with perforations that it fluttered like a tattered flag.

“Clayton, can you put me through to the deputies?” Robespierre asked as he adjusted the collapsible stock on his MP-15. His rifle was sighted in for point-blank at 100 yards, but the distance he looked at now was closer to 250. Immediately, he recalled his training class. The M-16’s classic 5.56 mm NATO round was lighter and much flatter shooting than the rifles Robespierre had grown up with. He’d have to trust the micrometer flip-up sights to not undershoot at the gunmen harrying his fellow lawmen. While he’d heard that abbreviated M-16s in the Gulf and Afghanistan had proved to be less than fully effective at long distances, the Iowa DPS had assured him that those failures were with rifles with barrels two inches shorter, and utilizing standard military ball ammunition. None of the alleged shortcomings were apparent in the hands of marksmen who placed their shots well.

“You’re hooked up now, Robey,” Clayton said over the radio.

“How many troopers we have here?” a deputy asked.

“Just one,” Robespierre said. “But backup’s on the way. What’s the situation down there?”

“I’ve got one officer down and bleeding badly,” came the response. “And there’s six crazies with guns still active around us. I’m on my last five shots.”

Robespierre hoped that his sights were tuned correctly as he pulled the trigger on the MP-15, spitting a single projectile out of the barrel. The 5.56 mm bullet struck the metal of a railing 250 yards away, sparks flying and causing one of the food-caked gunmen only inches from the point of impact to flinch, rifle slipping from his hands. Robespierre’s heart hammered as he realized that he’d taken a shot at another human being. As a lawman, his job was to save and protect lives, not take them, and shooting someone in the back was something he hadn’t anticipated.

This wasn’t a wild canine stalking a chicken coop or an injured farm animal that had been mortally wounded by a car; this was a fellow American citizen. Robespierre pulled the trigger again, nerves getting to him as his finger jerked hard, pulling the weapon off target. The second shot made another of the marauding riflemen stumble, and he realized that it was a teenage boy, his face smeared with crusted food. His shirt buttons had popped around his belly, exposing livid red welts where the skin and tissue had split from where his belly had expanded. The kid collapsed to the ground with enough force that his overstretched stomach burst, coils of stuffed intestine rolling out of splits in the skin.

Robespierre recoiled mentally from the horror of what had happened to the kid he’d just shot.

“Christ, not another popper,” the deputy groaned.

“Another?” Robespierre asked.

“These guys are crammed full of shit that’s been sitting in their guts for days. None of it’s digested,” the deputy explained. “Look out, they’re heading up toward you.”

“Then get out of there,” Robespierre said. “I’ve got their attention.”

“You can handle this?” the deputy asked.

Robespierre tried to tame the butterflies that whirled in his stomach, but managed the strength to lie. “I got this.”

The windshield of his Crown Vic suddenly violently shuddered, a fist-size hole punched through it. One of the remaining gunmen had cut loose with his bolt-action rifle, a powerful .30-caliber deer-hunting round easily penetrating the squad-car-quality safety glass. Another bullet made a loud crunch against the grille of the car, steam suddenly spitting out of the cracks between the hood and the fenders. Robespierre, even crouched behind the door of his car, had to recoil from the sudden wave of heat blowing over him. Other guns boomed downrange, but nothing came close. They were either pistol-caliber carbines or they were shotguns, unable to reach all the way up to the squad car.

It was a small consolation. Robespierre was half blinded by steam and he was in no mood to go up against a group of people who might as well have just been more victims than madmen.

Suddenly, the world seemed to go silent around Robespierre. A weight built up in the trooper’s chest, an oppressive force that seemed to crush his ribs and threatened to burst his lungs and heart. He glanced down at his chest and saw that his uniform blouse was darkening, growing slick against his chest. The squad car’s door had smoke curling through a hole that hadn’t been there before and Robespierre toppled helplessly away from the squad car, gasping and trying to fill his lungs.

He’d worn his vest, but the bullet, after cutting through sheet metal and the car’s interior wall, had gone through his side, only clipping the edge of his Kevlar. The overwhelming trauma of the impact was not an indication of the lethality of the hit, thankfully. The 30-caliber slug had shattered a rib and entered Robespierre’s thoracic cavity, but it had miraculously avoided brachial arteries, coming to a stop as it deformed against the man’s shoulder blade. With the scapula and rib broken, Robespierre felt as if he were being crushed by a python. The effects would be lethal if the internal bleeding wasn’t stopped.

He wasn’t dead, though his mind was completely out of the fight. He’d taken the hit, and like most human beings, he equated severe injury from a gunshot wound with the end. Finally, he sucked in a breath, and it felt like heaven, his senses starting to clear.

Blurry-eyed, he rolled his head, looking under the car door. There was movement downhill, and through the fog between his ears, he could finally hear the chatter of gunfire. He wanted to speak up, to continue shooting and fighting back, helping the deputies on hand.

“Get up,” he croaked to himself, reaching out to the door handle for leverage. “Your brothers need help.”

With that and the strength of his uninjured left arm, Robespierre was able to haul himself off the asphalt, the car door creaking under the unnatural pressure put upon it by the wounded trooper.

“Statie? You still alive up there?” came a call over his radio.

“I’ll have…back…you…that,” Robespierre grunted out loud, each breath feeling like a dagger plunged into the right side of his chest. He could have sworn he’d sounded more eloquent, less bestial, when he was trying to revive himself. “You?”

“We’re fine,” the deputy replied. “You distracted them enough for us to put the last of the crazies down.”

Robespierre rested his head against the padding under the window of his car door. “Got hit.”

“Damn, why didn’t you say something?”

“No chance,” Robespierre replied. He could already hear Clayton’s excited voice over the patrol car’s dash radio, calling for medical assistance.

“Be fine,” Robespierre added, hanging on for dear life. He wasn’t having trouble breathing now, but he was starting to feel light-headed. The blood was dark, nonarterial, which was good news. If it was an artery, his chances of survival would be lessened considerably. Veinous and capillary blood wasn’t what fed his body the vital reserves of oxygen it needed to keep going, though eventually blood loss was going to become a life-threatening factor. Most of his incapacitation was due to the nearly paralyzing pain of broken bones.

The deputies were fairly distant, but they were making good time racing up the incline toward his car. Robespierre also heard the distant whir of a propeller growing louder, cutting through the ringing in his ears from the brief gun battle he engaged in. Even outside, the MP-15 patrol rifle put out a considerable wave of pressure and sound that had funneled into the interior of the squad car and rebounded, making his right ear full of a pealing whine set to drive him nuts.

He turned his attention toward the approaching aircraft, wondering if the Iowa State Police had dispatched a helicopter. Robespierre didn’t think it could happen this quickly, but he was glad for the arrival. The faster he got to a hospital, the faster his bleeding and broken bones could be taken care of.

He didn’t see a helicopter, nor even a Cessna-style prop plane. The approaching craft looked akin to a torpedo with long, slender wings.

“’Zat?” Robespierre asked Clayton, slurring “what’s that” into a single utterance.

“You have something in the air by you?” Clayton returned. “Nothing has been dispatched.”

Through the fog of his traumatized mind, Robespierre recognized the odd object as it crawled slowly closer to him like a white, ramrod-straight maggot. He’d seen it on TV on a show about military weapons hosted by a bald guy who whispered dramatically to the point where he seemed more like a caricature than a soldier.

Global Hawk, the name came in a breathless, hushed tone pulled from the show. The wings seemed wrong, with cylinders nestled up beneath its pale belly.

This Hawk, came the host’s voice again, has talons.

“No…it couldn’t be,” Robespierre said to himself, his internal dialogue indeed clearer.

“Robey?” Clayton called over the radio. “What did you croak about?”

“Global Hawk,” Robespierre repeated, putting every ounce of strength into getting the name right.

“What?”

The unmanned drone soared over the squad car, and as it did so, two of the cylinders detached from the wing points. Robespierre tapped his sagging reserves of energy once again, hauling himself behind the dashboard of the car as he saw them release.

“Cover!” he bellowed into his radio.

He wondered if the warning was in time, then he heard a loud, powerful thump in the distance. The windshield suddenly cracked as if struck with a sledgehammer, the glass turning white with fractures as the flexible polymer core sandwiched between the panes did its job, preventing razor-sharp shards from flying into the interior of the car. The squad car, being a hundred feet from the blast center, had absorbed the wave of three pounds per square inch of increased air pressure, the roll cage and safety glass absorbing the shock wave that proved powerful enough to fold the metal struts holding up traffic signs.

Robespierre remained safe and conscious for the fifteen minutes it took for backup and an ambulance to arrive at the quiet town of Albion. What the trooper hadn’t noticed, thanks to the impact of a rifle bullet into his thoracic cavity, was a prior explosion at the fruit stand he’d paused at, where he’d seen the remnants of people who ate until their throats clogged or were maddened enough by hunger to charge a man holding a shotgun. The previous blast had turned the roadside attraction and the corpses around it into vapor, the combined force of two 500-pound laser-guided bombs more than sufficient to produce a thirty-meter-wide crater where any body parts found would have been made of ash or crumpled, blast-shattered bone.

The town had been rocked by more than just two of the canisters. Robespierre had been shell-shocked for the devastating explosion, missing the other two bombs that had been part of the MQ-9 Reaper’s 3800-pound payload. The MQ-9 was far different from the jet-engine-powered Global Hawk RQ-4, precisely for the propeller wash that had convinced the trooper that an aircraft had been approaching. Its six 500-pound dumb bombs had been more than enough to turn Albion into a smoldering crater—actually, two huge butterfly-shaped craters easily thirty meters wide. Even though Iowa was in the dreaded tornado alley of the central United States, the construction of the town hadn’t been sturdy enough to deal with the overpressure that flattened brick walls and turned wood to splinters.

Only Robespierre’s distance from ground zero, and the bloody mess he’d been reduced to, had spared him as the Reaper’s operator assumed he was likely mortally wounded. Had the trooper shown more signs of life than sagging against a car door, the drone’s operator would have used one of the wing-mounted AGM Hellfire missiles on the squad car, turning it into a mass of twisted wreckage.

It was a bit of overconfidence and laziness on the drone crew’s part. Not only did there exist a living witness to the carnage of Albion, but there was also dash-camera footage of a renegade, heavily armed unmanned aerial vehicle blowing a town on American soil to oblivion.



THE RINGING of a phone jarred Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz from his sleep, and his head popped up from the pillow. In the dark hotel room’s other bed, Schwarz’s best friend, Rosario “Politician” Blancanales, continued to snore. According to the luminous dial on Schwarz’s watch, it was a little after five in the afternoon.

Able Team, a three-man counterterrorism and anti-crime squad, had been hunting leads from the shadows of evening past the crack of dawn.

This particular hunt had brought them to Chicago, and the search was on for the steering and laser guidance models that would turn a gravity-flung conventional bomb into a precision strike munition. Such a device—let alone a large shipment—in the hands of the wrong people would result in large death tolls. One well-placed warhead, even of the 250-pound variety, would be able to collapse a skyscraper in on itself as if it were made of precariously balanced playing cards. A crowded office building or a federal building would go from bustling workplace for thousands of people to a tomb for those teeming multitudes.

Schwarz let the phone stop ringing and pulled out his personal Combat PDA. The screen blipped to life, and Barbara Price was on the other end.

“What’s going on?” Schwarz asked.

“We found a few of the laser guidance modules,” Price said, her voice grim and eyes unwavering from the webcam she looked into. “Northeastern Iowa, near the Illinois border.”

“How many killed?” Schwarz asked.

That bit of conversation prompted Blancanales to sit up, fully awake, turning on the bedside lamp. Schwarz grimaced at the pile of pizza boxes and junk food bags overflowing from the room’s tiny garbage pail.

Though Blancanales’s hair was whitened with age, his weathered face lined with wrinkles, the man’s back and shoulders were tautly muscled, ropy coils of sinew flowing as he threw on his shoulder holster and then tugged on a sport shirt to conceal the carry rig.

“We can’t tell. Official reports put the population of Albion at 250, but there’s no finding most of their bodies,” Price said. “But we have an eyewitness and dash-cam footage. Hal’s doing everything to keep this squashed in the press, so you guys better get out there.”

Schwarz nodded for his CPDA’s webcam. “Something else is wrong?”

“The survivor and radio dispatch are telling us stories of strange activity before the bombs hit,” Price answered. “Very strange activity that makes the laser-guided bombs now a secondary concern.”

Schwarz frowned. “We’ll head to the airport and have Mott take us in.”

The CPDA connection clicked off, and Schwarz looked to his old buddy.

“Worse than laser-guided bombs?” Blancanales asked. “This is going to be another bad one.”

“I took the call. You go wake Carl,” Schwarz told him.

Blancanales, already dressed, nodded and acceded to his friend’s request. Schwarz took the opportunity to get his gear prepared for the trip. There was a knock at the room door much quicker than he would have expected.

Schwarz kept his pistol hidden behind his leg, just in case there was trouble. It was Blancanales again.

“You didn’t get Carl?” Schwarz asked.

Blancanales held up a note. “He taped this to our door.”

Schwarz unfolded it. “�Picking up a loose end,’” he read out loud.

Blancanales nodded. “We’ll find him quick enough if we follow the sounds of the explosions.”

Schwarz sighed. “I’ll call Mott and have him wait for us while we rein in the Ironman.”

“If I know him, he’s been out all day,” Blancanales replied. “He might just be done already.”




CHAPTER TWO


Chicago’s late-afternoon weather was just perfect for Carl Lyons. It was neither too warm for the loose gun-concealing leather jacket he wore, nor was it so cold that he would risk being seen as out of place by leaving the jacket unzipped, thus making it quicker for him to reach for his defensive weapons.

Lyons was a former LAPD officer, and he generally wore a spine-numbing scowl that could unnerve even the toughest enemy. In a shoulder holster, Lyons wore the replacement for his old Colt Python, a Smith Wesson Model 686 Plus. It was a 7-shot .357 Magnum revolver with a six-inch barrel, giving the Able Team commander the option to engage enemies at up to 200 yards. The weapon had been refined in the Stony Man Farm armory, given a matte, nonreflective finish, Pachmayer Compact grips and a trigger job that made double-action shooting swift and instinctive. His backup for the mighty Mag-Plus was another Smith & Wesson, this time the polymer-framed MP-45, a sleek weapon that carried ten fat .45-caliber rounds in the magazine and another in the pipe. Lyons and the rest of the team had gone with the version that had the same thumb safety levers as on their single-action Colt 1911 autos, a lifesaving option if it came time to wrestle for the big .45, but not a hindrance to a locked and cocked .45 user as the levers worked identically to their Colt counterparts.

Kissinger, their armorer, had wanted to see how the same company’s 1911 version would work, but Able Team had grown spoiled with high-capacity magazines, and the MP-45 had one that fit flush instead of sticking out, making concealment difficult. Kissinger modified these with extended, threaded barrels for suppressed work and a knurled knob that protected the threads when not wearing a silencer. Lyons’s belt carried not only the .45, but also spare ammunition pouches for both pistols, a flashlight holder, a folding knife and his PDA/communicator, as well as a flat package of cable ties that could be deployed either as handcuffs, improvised door locks or tourniquets to prevent massive bleeding.

As a former beat cop, Lyons didn’t mind the weight that hung around his hips, especially since it would give him an edge toward survival. Schwarz and Blancanales had often teased him about being a big Boy Scout, always being prepared. Lyons had never been in the Scouts, and he doubted that there was a merit badge for busting up bar fights or dropping a hostage taker with a single gunshot from across a parking lot. However, that preparedness was what had elevated the burly, blond ex-cop to become one of America’s top nine fighting men, the people called upon when every other option was either used up or any other law enforcement or military response was simply too slow to save the day. Lyons’s entire existence now was lived day-to-day, looking out for worst-case scenarios and maintaining the mental agility to solve those problems as they came to him.

Lyons slid into a tenement building and slipped his flashlight into his hand, palmed to conceal it. It was a four-inch-long, squat, fat pipe of knurled steel with a rubber cap at one end for the toggle switch. The lens at the other end was surrounded by an octagonal collar that had the density and strength to shatter glass or lay open a cheek down to the bone. Lyons hadn’t needed the nine powerful LED bulbs for illumination, his eyes quickly adjusting to the shadows of the lobby, but the flashlight would prove to be an effective impact weapon against an attacker, and those LED lights would sear the vision of someone trying to attack him with a gun in the close quarters of the lobby.

That kind of thinking was how the man called Ironman had become Able Team’s leader, commanding two Special Forces veterans when Lyons hadn’t had traditional military or paramilitary experience. The big blond ex-cop had survived the rough streets of Los Angeles and had also survived for years working undercover against the mob, quite often teaming with Mack Bolan, the Executioner. It was surviving against mob hits and backing up Bolan in his one-man war that had earned Lyons the nickname Ironman, a legacy that had been forged even deeper in hell zones from the jungles of South America to the deserts of the Middle East.

That kind of edge and awareness had been born in the streets, though. The team had been on the hunt for a shipment of modules that were capable of turning unguided bombs packed with hundreds of pounds of high explosives into precision killing machines. The most dramatic instance of such a tool utilized in a city was when the Israeli Defense Force had fired one at a terrorist leader who had taken up residence in an apartment building ringed with bodyguards and the added “protection” of innocent Palestinian civilians living in the building. The whole complex had been taken out by a single one-ton bomb that killed fourteen and wounded fifty others. The building had been turned into a crater, and had the warhead been launched at any other time, the death toll would have been even greater. It wasn’t the kind of move that Lyons would have preferred, but to only kill fifteen people with two thousand pounds of high explosives, launched from a supersonic strike fighter, was a sign of how deadly those modules could be.

That was the kind of firepower that a terrorist group, no matter how disciplined, could hardly keep secret. There would be bragging, an increase in veiled threats, something that broke loose into the whisper stream, rumors flying through the underground that someone would trade in on. Hundreds of the high-tech units could be combined with weapons no more refined than steel pipes stuffed with plastic explosives and rolled out of the back of a cargo plane. One of these could easily be dropped into a meeting of Congress, or an airport crowded with innocent travelers, causing death and devastation in a manner that terrorists loved.

The arms-dealer trail was their only lead. It was what had gotten them to Chicago, but nothing had gone further. The Farm’s cybernetic crew had worked hard, pulling out the stops on suspected foreign and domestic terrorist groups who would have the money and coordination for such a theft under the opinion that perhaps one cell had been disciplined enough to hold their tongues.

But that wasn’t how it appeared. From radical Islamic fundamentalists—the scourge who gave the Arab world a bad reputation—to Illinois neo-Nazis—a scourge who gave all humanity a worse reputation—no one seemed to be primed with confidence or assigning extra security to protect their illicit firepower.

The laser modules had moved on somewhere, and they had most likely gone to be stored with the bombs that they were destined to steer toward death and destruction.

Lyons knew that the trail had gone cold, and with that sudden chill came the realization that the next chance they’d have would be when fire fell from the sky upon American citizens.

The lobby was empty except for the cage where a security guard leaned back in his chair, idly watching black-and-white screens. Lyons only got a glimpse of the man as he’d passed, but the ex-cop had his senses tuned to suck in as much data as possible.

The guard was all wrong. Instead of a bored, inattentive washout with a slight roll, or an exhausted beat cop working a second job to feed his kids, this guy was fit and he was focused. He’d given Lyons the same eyeball treatment that he’d received, and his attention returned to the security screens. The gun in his holster was a customized Colt-style 1911 autopistol, carried locked and cocked in quality leather. Modern cops were the kind of people who preferred different arms, and in a city and environs like Chicago, the single-action sidearm was not approved, nor as inexpensive as the Glocks and other polymer-framed pistols that had risen in popularity. While the guy might have been SWAT, thus having the standard of training to have a police rig for the 1911, he still wasn’t in “second job” mode. No radio played in the silence of the lobby, nor did the guy wear earbuds attached to a digital music player.

The laid-back approach was faked. That level of security awareness, plus the high-profile, skill-intensive sidearm, added up to the sum that Lyons sought. This was the place he was looking for, and he strolled with renewed confidence and energy. He didn’t believe that he’d need Schwarz or Blancanales for this leg of the investigation. After all, this was only an organized crime transportation service, and while there would be a need for armed guards around the storehouse and loading docks, this was too much of a residential building to serve as either, though Lyons wouldn’t put anything past the mob. Chicago had a significant Italian-American organized community still, much like New York and New Jersey, and the Mafia had remained resilient enough to resist being put to pasture by groups who had risen to power in other major metropolises. These low-income tenements were nothing like the monolithic, soul-draining prisons like Cabrini Green, which had been demolished after they’d become cesspools controlled by powerful drug gangs.

Still, this particular tenement was big enough to prove to be a good fortress while still being low profile.

“Hey, Blondie.” The guard’s voice rose. “I gotta buzz you in. Who’re you here to see?”

Lyons was halfway to the elevators and stopped, looking over his shoulder. If this guard was as sharp as he’d assumed, there was no way that the security man would miss the arsenal he wore, no matter how loosely the leather jacket draped over it. “I’m here on business. Didn’t Scalia tell you?”

It was a bluff. Lyons had spent a few moments on the phone with Chicago’s org-crime unit, making use of his old contacts from when he was an undercover Fed, and he’d picked up a few names from the police that he could drop. Scalia was high enough that security wouldn’t want to be caught questioning his orders, but not so important that he would seem out of the loop giving such orders.

“Scalia?” the uniformed guard asked. “Don’t matter. You’re walking in here armed. I wouldn’t be surprised if you had a 25 mm turret in there.”

Lyons smirked, then pulled his lapel aside. “Nah. Just a six-inch .357 Magnum.”

“Damn, son,” the guard said. “Not far from it.”

“So what? I have to leave my heat here at the desk?” Lyons asked.

The guard shook his head. “I do have to pat you for wires, and I’d like to see your cell.”

Lyons nodded, doffing his jacket. The guard made note of Lyons’s body armor, and kept feeling. He was a professional, not minding having to mess with another man’s junk to look for concealed electronics. A signal sweep might not work in case the device had remote activation.

The guard took Lyons’s Combat PDA, the only phone he’d had with him. Luckily, the Able Team leader had switched it over to a new identity, locking off any history of calls to law enforcement, replacing it with a series of random names and numbers produced by an logarithm devised by Hermann Schwarz and Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman to provide a clean identity. Only Lyons’s thumbprint could return the device to its normal contact list and background data. Stony Man Farm was nothing if not efficient and well-prepared when providing its members with secure communications.

“You kinda Nordic-looking to be muscle for the outfit,” the rent-a-cop said.

Lyons chuckled. “And you bleed marinara sauce?”

The guard smiled. “Welcome to the new thing. Diversity in operation.”

“My phone?” Lyons asked.

“Stays here,” the sentry returned. “Someone clones your signal and dials in, it’s like you’re wearing a mike anyway. The only phones past this lobby are landline.”

Lyons nodded. “Scalia don’t fuck around when it comes to OPSEC.”

The guard’s interest was piqued now. “Military?”

“Private contractor,” Lyons answered with just enough disappointment to let the real veteran know that he was someone who hadn’t been tolerated in a war zone by military brass, but had been in action and carried the same battle confidence that someone in the Sandbox would have.

“Well, just keep things private, Mr. Contractor,” the guard replied. “I’m not the only one here you’re gonna mess with. Two pistols and lightweight undercover Kevlar isn’t going to mean much if you do decide to get nasty.”

Lyons gave the guard a small salute, then got on the elevator. He’d have to get the CPDA back from the front desk on his way out. Hopefully, he wouldn’t have to pick it out of rubble if that was the case.



CALVIN JAMES LIKED Paris, a truly multicultural center that had accepted and nurtured some of the finest black American expatriates into global superstars on the music, writing and acting scenes. On these streets resided a history of great artists who’d come here in self-imposed exile rather than buckle under to an age of racism that did its best to snuff out their creativity simply because of the color of their skin. James often wondered how he would have dealt with those times, and knew that any chance a black doctor would have had would have been thin and as ghettoized as every other segment of American society back in those days.

James loved America; there would never be any doubt about that. He had bled for her even before he had been recruited to Phoenix Force. And part of his love stemmed from how America could heal, improve and right the wrongs of the past.

The infiltration of a country’s leadership by clever, predatory scum was not the country’s or the government’s fault. The greedy and corrupt would always find a way to positions of power, and nothing short of complete martial law and the revocation of liberty could ever quell such ambitions. As a soldier of freedom, he would never let that happen.

Here and now on the streets of Paris, the flight was not from injustice, but from those seeking to bring evildoers to justice. The target was Aasim Bezoar, a Syrian biochemist who had been traveling through Europe. Bezoar’s schooling had been in Moscow, back in the era of the Cold War, and he had been one of the top men in Syria’s chemical and biological weapons programming, helping to build an arsenal that would give Israel pause should they ever attempt reprisal for their interference in Lebanon. Bezoar’s machinations had been part of the reason for the cold peace between Syria and Israel, but they had also been part of other, more dangerous problems that had only been barely contained thanks to the efforts of law enforcement and espionage across the world.

One of James’s first missions with Phoenix Force had been an operation in Greece where hardline Soviets had invented an enzyme that would have destroyed the stomach lining of people it was exposed to, dooming them to malnutrition. That terrifying attack had been stopped cold, and James had cemented his position as one of the five pillars of Phoenix Force.

Bezoar had been involved in the research, but not the execution of the Proteus Enzyme, and as such, he had escaped the wrath of Stony Man Farm’s operatives.

Now Bezoar had popped up on the radar in Paris. His ties with the Syrian government had been dissolved for some reason. The Syrians had claimed he’d died a year ago, but here he was, alive and well.

James and his comrades hadn’t been the first ones to take notice of Bezoar. A team of operatives from Damascus had made the attempt to retrieve him. It was their corpses, floating in the Seine, that had alerted Interpol, and by extension, Stony Man, that the chemist was alive and in the City of Lights. When a supposedly dead biochemist attracted a force of assassins, Barbara Price knew Phoenix Force was meant to be involved.

David McCarter, the leader of Phoenix Force, walked beside James. A fox-faced man with hard, glinty eyes, McCarter was a British citizen, and more importantly, a veteran of Britain’s storied Special Air Service before being recruited to the Sensitive Operations Group. His mastery of counterterrorist tactics was second to none, backed up by a wild man’s energy disciplined by years of experience. Throwing in his knowledge of Arabic, German and French—as well as his ability to fly anything with wings or propellers—was the icing on a hardcase cake.

The members of Phoenix Force were picked because they could fight, but none of them was just pure brawn. Each of them knew at least three languages fluently, as well as possessing a gamut of knowledge ranging from deep sea diving, archaeology, structural engineering, medicine and chemistry.

Hundreds of lives were at risk, and Phoenix Force had the Syrian assassins to thank for it. Damascus was hardly a friend of the United States and the rest of the Western world, but when the Syrian government reacted to one of their own going rogue, the globe had to sit up and take notice.

“Anything, Cal?” McCarter asked.

James shook his head. “Still nothing. How much longer are we going to watch that hole in the wall?”

McCarter took a deep breath. James knew that before he’d been given leadership of the team, his impetuous and impulsive nature had him chomping at the bit to get into action. Anything that hinted of hesitation crawled under McCarter’s skin like a burr. Since his promotion, however, even the appearance sitting idly was misleading. The Briton’s mind was buzzing, a gleaming light shining behind his eyes indicating thoughts racing along as he plotted angles and strategies.

Being the boss didn’t make things easier, but it alleviated any boredom he used to have.

“Until we’re ready,” McCarter said.

James shook his head again. “A few years ago, I’d ask who the hell you are and what you’d done with the real David.”

McCarter looked at James and winked. “The real David’s having fun working out the probabilities of my plans a dozen times over, looking for every single outcome. Before, I had to twiddle my thumbs, waiting to do my thing. Now I’m rolling plans in my head to make sure all you little chickadees return home to roost, not just because you’re all my mates, but because Mama Hen Barb would turn me into a fryer if I fucked up.”

“I’m so glad that our friendship is more important than your fear of reprisals, David,” James said.

McCarter chuckled, then brought his radio to his lips. “Gary, luv. Still warm up there?”

“A Paris evening in November?” Gary Manning asked. “In Canada, this is T-shirt weather.”

“Any change of security?” McCarter returned.

“Same patrol patterns. Bezoar has some tightly wound people watching him, and they’re not fucking around,” Manning answered. “They haven’t noticed you two yet, but then, it takes me a minute to locate you.”

“Good news,” McCarter said. “T.J., how’re you doing?”

“Aside from the hairy eyeballs I caught from security, I’m peachy,” Hawkins told him. “They noticed me just walking on the sidewalk, so Bezoar has plenty of sharp eyes and ears on the scene.”

“A visit from Damascus woke them up, likely,” Rafael Encizo commented from his vantage point.

“Not this bunch,” Hawkins countered. “This wasn’t cockroach scrambling, this was lions watching a zebra. Not a nice feeling being the prey.”

“Just about satisfied, David?” Encizo asked.

“Almost,” McCarter responded.

James noticed a sudden perk of interest rise in the Phoenix Force commander. “Spot something?”

“A truck picking up trash,” McCarter said, nodding toward the vehicle. “Gary, how many guns are on it?”

They waited for Manning for a couple of moments, then the Canadian spoke up. “Five. How’d you guess?”

“I’ve done stakeouts in this area of town before,” McCarter answered. “Rubbish isn’t picked up on this day of the week, and not two haulers off a truck at the same time.”

“Amazing the amount of crap you remember,” James muttered.

“I noticed,” McCarter replied. “The Syrians sent in reinforcements.”

“We move on them?” Encizo asked.

McCarter shook his head, then spoke up. “No. We let them start this party, then we slip around the back.”

“Worked for Striker, might as well work for us,” James said.

McCarter reached for his valise and opened it, scanning the Fabrique Nationale P-90 concealed within. The tiny chatterbox was stuffed with a 50-round magazine. “We want Bezoar alive, chickadees. Treat him with kid gloves. Anyone else, fuck ’em. Especially the party from Damascus.”

The garbage truck rolled close to Bezoar’s apartment building.

McCarter and his Phoenix Force teammates were in motion before the first pop of a submachine gun was barely audible in the distance.




CHAPTER THREE


Arno Scalia walked down the hall, mouth turned in a frown that was only amplified by the downward turn of his black mustache. The fluorescent lights shone off his shaved head as he fiddled with his key in the lock. He’d just left the most secure room in the building, a structure that had cost one hundred thousand dollars to build and had been designed to resist any manner of eavesdropping. The phone call that had come in over a shielded and encrypted landline had made him uncomfortable.

Last week he and the outfit had moved crates of military electronics. Nothing could be identified, as it was still in the packaging and the labels had been scraped off, but the order was “don’t ask, don’t tell.” For the higher-ups to actually have to repeat that to Scalia, one of the most discreet of men in the entire family, it was a sign that there was no fooling around with this shipment. Nothing falls off the back of the truck, nobody looks inside a crate and for certain no one will ever speak of it again.

That kind of double-checking was indicative of two conditions. One was that the organization had received a boatload of money to keep this well under the radar. The other was that his bosses, some of the hardest gangsters in Chicago, were frightened of the consequences of a single error.

Scalia was a professional, one who wouldn’t make such a mistake, and if his subordinates had screwed up under him, he’d take it out of their hides. The shit would continue to roll downhill, until someone paid for the amount of grief he’d caused, the level of punishment rising with each and every person the frustration had passed through. No one in the transport office would screw things up. It was just too well enforced internally.

Now, he’d just received a phone call regarding a trio of Feds who were asking questions in town. Scalia had to keep an eye out for them, and if there was anything out of the ordinary, he was to quash it at a moment’s notice.

“A trio of Feds,” he murmured, repeating the term. “Actually, they were called �super-Feds.’”

Scalia had been in the Mafia long enough to know what that term meant. Some government agencies didn’t have to work by a set of rules that allowed groups like his to operate in relative freedom. The mention of a trio of super-Feds had also popped up all over the country, often just preceding a blitz that was second only to the horrors inflicted upon them by a lone vigilante whose name was never spoken anymore. Scalia had been present in other towns where the local organized crime had received visits from mystery men waving around Justice Department credentials just before war exploded on the streets.

The vigilante might have gone legitimate, Scalia mused, and picked up some allies. It was always a rumor, a conspiracy theory among the families, chatter about how the greatest scourge of their professional careers engaged in one bloody weeklong endgame that had crippled their infrastructure, then disappeared. Some had called it a monopoly-breaking strategy. Sometimes people using his old strategies of urban warfare came back for a visit, leaving wreckage in their wakes.

Scalia stepped into his office and saw that his multiline phone had a blinking message. He felt the blood begin to drain from his face as he could only think that it was someone in his own service telling him about a mystery visit. He hit the message playback, fumbling with the drawer of his desk to get to the pistol inside.

“Boss, it’s Dev at the desk. Some blond bastard by the name of Steele came by, telling me he was called in by you,” the message said. “I have the rest of security keeping an eye on him, but I didn’t want too much of a clusterfuck.”

Scalia sneered and hit the button for the main desk. “Dev?”

“He bluffed his way past me, pretending that he knew you,” came the answer from Lebron Devlin. “I got a look at his gear, and I’m scanning his cell for signals. All he has is two pistols, a big fuckin’ hog and a Glock or somethin’.”

Scalia sneered. “Get everybody to surround him and ready to move in. This guy is trouble!”

The door clicked and Scalia looked away from the phone for a brief moment. The doorway was filled with a broad, grim-looking bastard in a loose leather jacket, cold eyes glaring from under a brooding brow.

“No need to go all-out for me,” the guy said. “I’m just here to talk, not to fight. If I were here to cause shit, Dev wouldn’t be talking right now.”

Scalia swallowed. “So…let’s talk.”

The blond hulk in the doorway smiled, took a step in, and the door clicked in the ominous silence.



CARL LYONS COULD SEE the look of realization on Arno Scalia’s face when he opened the door. The Able Team leader knew that he wouldn’t have a lot of time before attracting the attention, and potentially the wrath, of the organization’s security. He was glad that he was able to continue his bluff, riding the wave of audacity and confusion among the mobsters all the way to the boss’s office.

“So let’s talk,” Scalia had told him, and Lyons closed the door behind him. There was a pleasing quality to the mobster’s uncomfortable silence that only added to his graveyard grin. Scalia wasn’t a small man, and the .45 auto he’d drawn from his desk drawer could easily have caused him some trouble, even with his body armor.

However, Lyons knew the value of intimidation and also realized the strength of adapting personality to the conversation. When he had been in the lobby, he was simply one of the guys, blowing smoke up people’s asses and getting accepted. Now, when he needed some questions answered, he had slipped into crazy-caveman mode. The grin he wore was pure cockiness, but the glint of determination in his eyes signaled a willingness to spill blood by the bucket.

Scalia picked up on that insanity, which, coupled with Lyons’s thick, muscular form, was a warning beacon.

“You…know that I have to maintain some secrecy for my organization…” Scalia said. “Professional…”

“Yeah, right, whatever,” Lyons cut him off. “If you know why I’m here and suspect who I learned my trade from, then you know that I’m not here to listen to you jack off at the mouth. I want answers or I’ll take blood.”

Scalia’s lips tightened into a bloodless line, his eyes flicking to the phone on his desk.

“Sure, hit your panic button, Arno. That’s not going to save your life,” Lyons said.

Scalia returned his gaze to Lyons’s face. “I’m sure I know why—”

“Then I don’t have to ask you any fucking questions, Arno,” Lyons snarled. “Don’t stall.”

Scalia nodded. “You’re wondering about some military stuff that went through here.”

Lyons nodded. His eyes burrowed into Scalia, who shifted uneasily in his seat and swallowing hard. Lyons knew that while there were ways to get information out of people—and he’d been forced to utilize torture at times for the sake of last-minute expedience—the best interrogators got their answers just by force of will. These types of interrogations were Lyons’s favorite. There was no blood, there was no moral quandary, and the answers weren’t the first lies screamed that made the pain stop. The Able Team commander was not a murderer or a sadist; he was a warrior and a seeker of justice.

“Well,” Scalia began, “we took the shipment and waited for them to bring their own trucks. We didn’t look inside, especially since the bosses made sure we didn’t fuck it up. They’re scared.”

“But you know who I come from, don’t you?” Lyons asked.

Scalia looked down, breaking eye contact. His bald dome was beaded with nervous sweat that rolled down his forehead in rivulets. “I don’t want to say his name.”

“You do know my friend Mack,” Lyons said.

Scalia visibly shuddered, his cheeks tingeing green as if he were fighting off a particularly violent bout of food poisoning. “Th…th…they said he was dead.”

“You think you can kill the devil made flesh, come to collect the souls of you damned petty thugs?” Lyons asked, his voice dropping to a deep, rumbly baritone, tapping every movie about exorcism he’d ever seen as a boy. “The living spirit of murder and terror does not die, no matter how much you shoot him or burn him.”

The acrid stench of urine suddenly filled the air as Scalia messed himself, tears joining the cascade of sweat droplets crawling down his face. “Oh, God…”

“If you had any pull with Him, I would never have found you,” Lyons said, standing, leaning forward with his knuckles on the desktop. He was bent close to Scalia’s face, his growl low and unholy. “Confession is your only salvation.”

Scalia flinched, one eye squinted shut, the other a mere sliver. “Please, Father in Heaven…”

“Now you find religion, after moving illegal automatic weapons and drugs across the country?” Lyons asked. “Your hypocrisy makes you an even more tasty treat.”

“Okay…okay…we sent out the crates to Idaho,” Scalia said. “We figured they were machine guns for the militias.” Lyons nodded.

“To make their own state. You know how crazy they are,” Scalia said.

“But they are honest in their hatred, if inaccurate as to the cause of their failures,” Lyons returned. “Idaho. Do you know where?”

“Just that the drivers let it drop that they were headed in that direction,” Scalia said. “They wanted to know the road conditions and such….”

“How do you know that they weren’t leaving a false lead?” Lyons asked, easing back down.

“Because I called the slip in, and an hour after that driver left, his corpse was found in a Dumpster three miles away,” Scalia answered. “These fuckers didn’t mess around.”

“A Dumpster. You and your people take care of the body?” Lyons asked.

“Not my department,” Scalia replied. “But his ass didn’t go to the morgue.”

“How long ago was this?” Lyons asked.

Scalia’s eyes widened.

“How. Long. Ago?” Lyons repeated with a growl for each word.

“Three days,” Scalia said. “So they should be in Idaho, even if they made rest stops, though I doubt it. There were multiple drivers for each rig.”

Lyons grimaced. “We’ll find them.”

“And what about me?” Scalia asked.

“You can make it easier for me to keep an eye on this operation, or the next,” Lyons said.

“Are you kidding me?” Scalia quizzed. “They know that I talked to you…”

Lyons picked up Scalia’s 1911 and let out a shrill, frightened scream, firing the entire magazine through the door. Once the slide locked open, he turned to Scalia. “This is going to hurt, but you’ll wake up.”

Scalia was frozen in wide-eyed horror as the big burly blond pulled the biggest revolver he’d ever seen from under his leather jacket. With a flick of the wrist and a sharp, searing flame across his forehead, the mobster’s fears vanished into the calming, accepting embrace of unconsciousness.

Lyons knew that he wasn’t going to have a lot of time before the security teams would be rushing toward the door. Just to make things more convincing for Scalia, he punched the unconscious man to raise bruises and welts on his face. A couple of shots to the side and the stomach, and he was done with that. Scalia would look like he’d been put through a wringer, and the sound of the beating would be audible through the doors. Lyons just had to make certain that he left witnesses alive.

That wouldn’t be too difficult for the Able Team leader.

The first two men through the door entered hard and hot, kicking through the weakened wood of Scalia’s office entrance, pistol-grip shotguns held at the hip and each blasting out a thunder-load of buckshot into the air. Obviously the two men must not have practiced much with 12-gauges without stocks as the recoil jerked the weapons in their grasps, but they’d been counting on the initial bellows of the weapons to cut down enemies in front of them, or the loud roars to act as a stun-shock grenade, overpressure hammering the ears of anyone who’d stayed out of the way.

Lyons had been standing to the side of the doorway, and he had been prepared enough to have a pair of electronic bud earplugs. They filtered potentially damaging sounds to manageable levels without compromising his ability to hear footsteps in the distance. The guard closest to Lyons looked over his shoulder to see the big blond ex-cop lunge at him. Lyons drove him face-first into Scalia’s desk with a heel strike to the back of his head.

The other gunner turned in reaction to his partner’s sudden crash, but Lyons was ready with a shotokan side kick that landed under the guard’s sternum with sufficient force to lift the man off his feet before he crashed against the bookshelf behind him. It took a moment for Lyons to be certain that these two could give a corroborating story to their superiors about the assault on Scalia.

Never one to pass up a free weapon or ammunition, Lyons scooped up a stockless shotgun from the floor. It was a stubby tool, and he readily recognized it as an Ithaca Model 37 Stakeout Shotgun, a tool he’d used before. It only had a thirteen-inch barrel, but that gave it a magazine tube with room enough for four rounds of 12-gauge buck. Lyons also noted that there was a sidesaddle that held six spare shells on the side of the receiver. Lyons took one shell and inserted it into the magazine, then grabbed the other weapon after slinging the first over his shoulder. Making certain that the other shotgun had been topped off, Lyons was ready for serious business. Eighteen rounds of 12-gauge would make busting out of the building much easier.

He picked up the stomp of feet in the distance and barreled out into the hall, the stubby shotgun easy to maneuver through the doorway. With a hard kick, he entered the room across the way, a storage room loaded with filing cabinets. He’d ducked in just in time to avoid a spray of pellets that chewed off the doorjamb. Lyons knew that his Kevlar would hold against their onslaught, but the enemy gunners probably had their own body armor. He popped around the jamb, sighted down the barrel of the Ithaca and emptied a charge into the legs of the lead gunman. The load of buckshot tore his thigh and knee to shreds, turning him from the point of the spear to a snarl in the flow of guards moving toward Lyons.

As he ducked back in, the hallway resounding with the booms of shotguns discharging unintentionally and bodies and metal bouncing on tile, Lyons reviewed the brief glimpse he’d taken of the security team. They wore bulky vests, obviously heavy enough to absorb the impact of a 12-gauge load to the chest. It wasn’t going to be a deadly blowout, leaving plenty to wonder what the hell had just hit them. Still, Lyons wanted these armed thugs to know that they were in the wrong line of business. One of their number was already maimed.

Lurching out into the open, he saw one of the mobster security gunners already up on one knee. Lyons triggered the Stakeout, its muzzle blast a mighty belch of flame and thunder. The guard whirled violently as his shoulder was smashed to a gory pulp of splintered bone and mutilated muscle. Lyons’s target had barely hit the floor when a second man rose from both hands, utilizing the strength of his legs to turn into a human missile aimed at Lyons’s midsection.

The ex-cop had played plenty of high school and college football in his days as a lineman. While he easily could have resisted the clumsy lunge, that would have tied him up too long to efficiently deal with the other two gunners who were recovering their wits and weaponry. Lyons sidestepped, bringing down his elbow between the tackle’s shoulder blades. Only the guard’s momentum had saved him from a severed spinal cord, but even so, he bounced off the tile floor face-first, teeth and blood flying everywhere from the messy impact. He wouldn’t be getting up soon.

One of the last two gunners swung his shotgun up to eye level. The Able Team commando dropped to the floor, barely a heartbeat ahead of a blast that would have destroyed his face and vaporized his brains. Lyons returned the nearly fatal favor, triggering his Stakeout between the man’s legs.

At a range of only a few feet, all nine pellets in a double O round of buckshot had little time to spread apart, so they struck almost as one, tearing and ripping through fabric and meat with equal ease. Unfortunately for the gunman, the pelvic girdle was made of tough, fracture resistant bone, which deflected the pellets through the man’s bladder, lower abdominal muscles and the network of arteries that fed his legs. Brilliant crimson erupted from the doomed gunner’s groin, horrific neural trauma making the dying man drop his weapon. He stumbled backward.

The last of the gunmen lurched to one side, avoiding his collapsing partner, but Lyons had racked the slide on his shotgun and blasted away again. The much more slender bones of this target’s forearm shattered as the wave of buckshot ripped through them. Some of the pellets deflected off the barrel of his weapon, but most of them continued on into the guard’s face, tearing furrows through cheeks and forehead. Slowed down by the man’s arm, they hadn’t proved fatal, but he was going to need significant reconstructive surgery for his shredded face.

Lyons got to his feet and headed for the stairwell that he had scouted before bursting into Scalia’s office. He’d had several minutes to stake out the building, planning his escape route and the response of the security team. That kind of foreknowledge had been key in getting him and his team out of the narcoterrorist-filled jungles of Colombia or neo-Nazi ambushes in southwestern box canyons. He made a beeline for the stairwell, entering it.

He heard the stomp of boots even as he paused to feed the Ithaca the last five rounds in its sidesaddle, racking a shell into the breech before topping off the magazine. Normally, shotguns were carried with empty chambers, but this was the middle of a combat situation, so running around without a fully loaded weapon was beyond foolhardy.

Weapon full and ready to roar, Lyons dropped to the midpoint of the flight of stairs between the second and third floors. His two-hundred-plus pounds of muscle and extra equipment came down on the landing like the hammer of an angry storm god, surprising the group of security guards who were coming up from below. That sudden start gave Lyons all the opportunity he needed to cut through the men, working the slide of the Ithaca as fast as he could pull the trigger.

The leader of the group, the black man he’d spoken to, was bowled backward, his body armor absorbing the first charge of buckshot, turning him into an avalanche of muscle and sinew that crashed down on the gunners behind him. The rest of Lyons’s 12-gauge thunder tracked higher under recoil, his brawny arms providing more than enough strength to resist the kick of the stubby weapon.

Faces and shoulders disappeared in clouds of bone-splinter-filled crimson mist, bodies tumbling out of Lyons’s way as he continued down toward the second story. Lebron Devlin croaked as Lyons passed him, one hand clawing empty air.

“You bastard,” Devlin gurgled.

Lyons dropped the empty Stakeout on Devlin’s chest in a show of dismissal. He had no time to chat. The door guard had suffered broken ribs from taking a burst at the range of only a few inches, so there was little way he could put up any more of a fight.

The way to the first floor was clear, though booms thundered from above as the gunners higher up opened fire in an attempt to catch up with the escaping Able Team commander. Lyons twisted and fired skyward to dissuade pursuit. There were screams as legs were peppered with .36-caliber pellets.

With a kick, he was in the lobby, stuffing new shells into the tube magazine of his remaining shotgun. He strode confidently toward the small security cage that Devlin had worked in. A single blast from the Ithaca opened the locked door, and Lyons was able to locate his Combat PDA lying in the middle of the desk. He checked to make certain that it hadn’t been opened.

Schwarz was brilliant yet paranoid. He’d set up the small multipurpose communicators to melt down if someone tried to access the electronics within. Since there was no burned puddle of smoldering desk, things were all right.

Lyons had no qualms about entering a den of heavily armed smugglers, but even he didn’t intend to anger Schwarz by leaving one of his prized creations behind in enemy hands.

He noticed that he’d gotten a message while he’d been dealing with Scalia.

Strike in Indiana. We’re wheels up in thirty without you, the text read.

Lyons opened a link to his partners as he dumped his empty shotgun, exiting the smugglers’ office. “Able One reporting in.”

“There you are,” Schwarz said. “I didn’t see one bit of the Chicago skyline disappear, so I thought you were taking a nap.”

Lyons knew that his friend’s levity was concealing concern for his safety. “Tell Mott to hold up until I get there. I’ve got trouble brewing in Idaho now.”

“At least four of the bombs landed in a little armpit of a town called Albion,” Schwarz told him. “We’re heading there to see what’s up.”

“Never heard of the place,” Lyons answered, sliding behind the wheel of his rental car.

“Never will again,” Schwarz returned. “Everyone in town was killed, including several sheriff’s deputies.”

Lyons glared at the offices. Now that he was back in his car, he had access to an M-4 with an underbarrel grenade launcher. If anyone dared to poke his face out the front door, he’d lay into the mobsters with high-explosive death.

Sadly, the smugglers were too smart to tempt fate. They’d hunkered down, knowing that to pursue Lyons would be suicide.

“Play now, pay later,” Lyons snarled as a grim promise, driving off to the airport to meet with the rest of his team.




CHAPTER FOUR


In his younger days, David McCarter, the current leader of Phoenix Force, had earned the reputation of a hard-driving badass. He always seemed to be in a constant state of pent-up, impulsive action, easily growing bored, even with training exercises. He’d lived on the edge, primed and ready for battle. Back then, waiting for the start of conflict was something that ate at the young warrior’s nerves.

These days, though, as commander of Phoenix Force, McCarter learned what had been missing. He’d lived his entire life seeking challenges that could match his phenomenal skills, taking to the cockpit of any new aircraft he could to master its maneuvers, testing out various martial arts to find their strengths in relation to others. He devoured books continually, starting out in military history but spreading out to political philosophy and analysis of current events. Far from a thug, he realized that the untamed fires within his gut were a strength that sought a task worthy of him.

Being the brains of Phoenix Force was that task, and the times when his impatience would get the better of him had disappeared as he applied his experience to plotting actions and reactions even before the first shot was fired.

So when the Syrians attacked, just as McCarter had anticipated, he was not only ready, but had also prepared Phoenix Force to deal with the sudden arrival. Experience had taught the Briton that there was little that could be done when a member of a country’s covert-operations community came to harm or capture. He remembered avenging the deaths of colleagues, and he recalled when a Phoenix ally, Karl Hahn, was kidnapped by a terrorist group and the team went rogue to bring him home alive. The Syrians had lost men to Bezoar, and even if Damascus had sent orders for the hit team’s comrades to pull back, anger and loss of friends were powerful spurs.

There was no way they were going to let this insult to their fellowship pass.

McCarter also knew that sometimes anger made men sloppy. From their approach to the front doors, ignoring even the obviously armed Hawkins strolling down the street, McCarter knew that they were focused on the job of bringing hell to Bezoar and his crew of fellow murderers. He keyed his hands-free radio to toss out the orders.

“Go time. T.J., even the odds should Bezoar’s people or the Syrians seem to be winning. Keep out of the way, though. You’re not packed for a proper dustup,” McCarter ordered. “Gary…”

“Eyes in the sky, backing T.J. and monitoring you,” Manning answered.

“Rafe, Cal, it’s on,” McCarter said. “T.J., remember, nothing gets past you to the public.”

“On it,” Hawkins answered.

Amid the chatter of automatic weapons, the men of Phoenix Force took flight.



THE SYRIANS HAD blown in, loaded for bear, especially if that bear wore tank armor and carried a grenade launcher, Hawkins mused as he found cover in a doorway, drawing the sleek Belgian P-90 machine pistol from under his jacket. Three SUVs screeched to a halt, windows open and assault rifles hammering at the windows of Bezoar’s Parisian safehouse. The twisting, narrow street in front of the house was clogged by the big vehicles’ presence. They opened fire on the windows of the storefront that Bezoar had set up as a diner so ram-shackle that even the prostitutes didn’t want a piece of it. The roar of big engines in the predawn had sent the women scrambling, their street instincts telling them that the trucks had either belonged to police or an organized hit crew.

Either way, they wanted nothing to do with that fight, disappearing between buildings or scurrying down the street past Hawkins. They studiously ignored him as the glass of the storefront diner disappeared in a solid wave of lead. Anyone who had been inside would have been shredded, and from what Hawkins had seen, there were a couple of men nursing cold coffee mugs as they cast anxious glares into the darkened street.

The Syrians weren’t holding back. The unmistakable thump of a 40 mm grenade launcher echoed down toward Hawkins’s doorway, its high-explosive message shaking the ground at his feet.

“Dave, the Syrians are going nuclear,” Hawkins said into his throat mike.

“Heard that,” McCarter replied. “Bide your time.”

Hawkins grimaced, hating the wait, but the Briton had given his orders, and he had pulled the team through countless confrontations.

The Syrians piled out of their vehicles, a dozen strong, as their trucks idled, drivers and shotgun riders waiting behind them to secure their getaway transportation. A quick glance told Hawkins that he was smart to have brought along a 50-round magazine full of armor-piercing ammunition. The SUVs were solidly built, and the way the lights of the skinny road reflected off their windshields let him know that they were armored. He reminded himself that Phoenix had wrung the compact machine pistols out, and their 5.8 mm rounds could punch through a titanium plate backed by twenty layers of Kevlar out to two hundred meters and go through 9 mm of steel plate at fifty. He was barely fifteen meters from the lead SUV, meaning that no matter how resistant the glass, he’d be able to put rounds into the interior without much effort.

One of the men in the lead truck poked his head and weapon out of the window. This guy had a submachine gun, as well, and he’d noticed Hawkins’s quick peek at the clogged road. Hawkins couldn’t make out what the gunner was packing, but it sure as hell wasn’t a folded newspaper and a cup of coffee. The roar of autofire filled the air as the doorjamb suddenly came alive with bullet impacts. Hawkins held his ground, enduring splinters of brick and old paint peppering his exposed face.

Whatever they were carrying, it was only a 9 mm, and for that he was grateful. Still, just because it couldn’t penetrate into his cubbyhole didn’t mean that Hawkins was free and clear to ignore the incoming fire. Once the barrage let up, Hawkins ducked low, rolled into the middle of the narrow road and opened up on a spot just above the SUV’s headlights.

The sleek, hypervelocity rounds from Hawkins’s PDW went to where he couldn’t see them above the glare of the lamps, but the clatter of a machine pistol on cobblestones rewarded the American Phoenix pro. He pumped out two more bursts, sweeping the headlights and blowing them out so that his night vision could recover from their bright flare. The engine snarled to life, and he could hear the vehicle jolt into gear.

Hawkins knew that the enemy was going to try to ram a half ton of truck down his throat, so he leveled the muzzle at the driver and cut loose. The last half of the P-90’s 50-round magazine elicited the crash and shatter of armored Plexiglas, but after a brief surge, the SUV no longer had pressure on the gas. The truck was idling forward, but its driver was dead.

Of course, that didn’t mean anything to the trailing SUVs. The gunners for each had clambered out behind partially open armored doors, scanning for Hawkins in the darkened street. Without the blaze of the headlights, he was just a shadow, flat on the ground.

That wouldn’t last for long, though.

He reloaded the machine pistol swiftly, all the while scrambling toward the idling, driverless SUV, keeping in the shadows from where the other vehicles’ lamps blazed down the narrow road. Hawkins rested against the bumper.

“Gary, leave anything for me?” Hawkins asked, knowing that such a question was moot when it came to the Canadian sniper.



TO MAINTAIN a low profile on this operation, the members of Phoenix Force opted for a set of tools that would help them look as if they were French special operations. This meant that their gear was typical police or military equipment. It allowed them use of familiar gear such as the PAMAS G1—a license-built Beretta 92-F—the FN P-90 and the suppressed rifle Gary Manning was currently riding, a PGM Ultima Ratio “Integral Silencieux” rifle in 7.62 x 51 mm NATO.

The Commando was a shortened version designed especially for urban operations teams. It was affixed with a 15.7-inch, integrally silenced barrel as opposed to the standard 24-inch tube, meaning that inside a crowded city, the Commando was handy and quick. Manning liked the name Ultima Ratio because it was Latin for “the last resort,” a term that went with Phoenix Force hand-in-hand, and it was derived from the original term ultima ratio regum, which was “the final argument of kings.” Since Phoenix Force had adapted their code names to variants of “king” and the phrase was a flowery synonym for “war”, Manning felt it was tailor-made for his cover identity of Gary Roy.

As soon as T. J. Hawkins started to take fire from the three SUVs in the street, he swung the muzzle of the suppressed Commando toward the convoy. Only one gunner was actively shooting, and as soon as he stopped his fusillade, Hawkins was in action. Through the optics of the rifle, he could see the muzzle-flashes of the P-90 through the end of its blunt silencer.

The headlights went out and the SUV lurched into action, but more autofire erupted from Hawkins’s position. Manning turned his attention to the other vehicles and saw that their gunners who had waited outside on security for the Syrian assault force were now looking for the source of the sudden, fierce combat that had erupted in front of them. The two gunmen were wary, but their attention was focused ahead of them, not behind and above.

Manning had complete surprise against them as he milked the precision trigger of the skeletonized combat sniper. The rubber recoil pad and suppressor made the lightweight weapon’s kick feel like a tender caress against his brawny shoulder as he punched a hole through the neck of one of the Syrians. The rearmost man’s death was instantaneous, spine severed and lower brain destroyed. He didn’t even shudder, falling to the ground as if he were a marionette with its strings cut.

Only the chatter of metal on cobblestones alerted the second gunman, who whirled to see his friend lying facedown in a sprawl of loose limbs.

Manning worked the bolt on the Ultima Ratio swiftly, the finely polished steel gliding noiselessly as it stripped another .308 Winchester subsonic round off the top of the 10-round box magazine. The time between the first and second shots, which struck the remaining Syrian gunner in the bridge of his nose, was less than a second. The noise made by the subsequent rifle shot was softer than a polite cough, but on the receiving end, the armed commando’s head burst like a melon.

“Gary, leave anything for me?” Hawkins asked.

“Get the middle SUV,” Manning instructed as the rearmost vehicle ground into Reverse. He didn’t have a good angle to see the driver of the truck, but Manning knew that a frightened driver would be a threat, not only communicating to the main assault team that they were under fire, but also tearing through the streets of Paris to escape pursuit. People could be run over.

Manning worked the rifle’s action as fast as he could, firing round after round into the roof of the SUV, adjusting his aim so that his fire would lance down into the driver’s seat. On his fourth shot, the escaping vehicle slammed its rear bumper into a storefront, glass shattering violently, metal crumpling as it met unyielding stone.

Hawkins ripped into the remaining Syrian escape car, his P-90 hammering at 800 rounds per minute, turning its windshield into a gaping hole and the driver into a mushy figure that resembled a deflating humanoid balloon.

“I hope to hell no one heard that crash,” Hawkins said.

“With David and the rest inside, I doubt they’d hear the sky crashing around them,” Manning answered.



RAFAEL ENCIZO WINCED, leaning back from the sudden slash of shotgun shells vomiting swarms of pellets like hungry, flesh-eating hornets. Bezoar’s defenders had carefully chosen their place to make their stand, and with a stubby set of 12-gauge scatterguns, they were able to dominate the row of windows where Encizo saw an additional team of Syrians collapsed. Only one of the Damascus assault squad was still alive, but his cheek had been torn off his face, one eye leaking down into the gaping flesh.

The Syrian saw Encizo and reached for his sidearm, his main weapon lost in the initial conflagration that left him facially mutilated. The Cuban was not a man to take chances, but he couldn’t bring himself to gun down a man, especially at such close quarters, and when he’d received terrible injuries already. With a kick, he disarmed the man and leaned his weight into the Syrian’s chest.

“I’m not here to kill you,” Encizo stated, pressing his forearm against the man’s throat. “In fact, we’re probably both here after the same man. Bezoar.”

With lacerations down the right side of his face, the Syrian’s grimace was hideous. “That…animal. He’s out of…control.”

Encizo could tell the genuine rage underneath the other man’s words. “Where else are you hurt?”

The man tugged open his shirt, looking down at the glimmering copper discs embedded in dark blue nylon beneath. “Armor stopped the bullets.”

Encizo let go of the man’s arm and loosened his forearm from the Syrian’s throat. “We’re on the same side.”

“Gunfire dropped off drastically,” the agent said.

“I’m not sure that’s a good thing,” Encizo said. He handed over a small, prepacked wound dressing kit. The maimed Syrian wasted no time, stuffing his pistol back into its holster and pressing a pad of gauze firmly against his torn socket. He’d never be able to save the eye. The best he could hope for was to keep out infection and prevent losing more blood. Micropore cloth tape held the dressing in place, especially one long strip wound three times around his head.

He’d live, but he didn’t look strong enough to get back on his feet. He’d been rattled too hard by the blast that had laid open his face. However, there was one chance that Encizo could take by recruiting the man as a friendly intelligence asset. The Syrians and Phoenix Force had clashed on several occasions, but this wouldn’t be the first time that the five-man team would work alongside traditional national enemies, especially in the face of a full-on crisis.

Whatever had caused Bezoar to become so instantly important to warrant not one but two attempts by the Syrian commando team, as well as garner the interest of Western intelligence, must have been big enough for Encizo not to regret the decision to rescue and aid a foe.

The Syrian commando took a fist full of Encizo’s sleeve. “He’s gone rogue.”

“You told me,” the Cuban replied.

“You don’t know how bad it is,” the injured man urged. “This is worse than anything your side could imagine. Even we didn’t want it to exist.”

“Exist?” Encizo asked.

“When Bezoar showed his test, it was too terrible,” the one-eyed commando continued. “It’s a deadly enzyme…some kind of infectious protein.”

“We figured as much,” Encizo returned. He didn’t want to betray his knowledge of one of Bezoar’s prior experiments, just in case the Syrians had a long enough memory to remember the destruction of a project that would otherwise have created a harvest hell throughout the Mediterranean.

“He improved on it,” the Syrian told him. “But we missed.”

“So you went after him again,” Encizo answered. He kept his attention only peripherally on the wounded man; his main job was to provide security for the back door.

“No, we missed now!” the Syrian hissed. “He’s gone.”

Encizo looked down at the wounded man.

“This was a trap, and both of our teams walked right into it,” the injured man croaked weakly.

Encizo felt his stomach twist at the news. “David, can you read me?”

No answer over the radio, nothing but a blanket of static that knocked out the radio network he was plugged into.

“David!” Encizo bellowed, hoping that his old friend could hear him.

Gunfire rose to a crescendo once more in a far part of the building.



DAVID MCCARTER GRIMACED as he realized that the tactical network that tied him to the rest of the team had gone silent. He waved to Calvin James, and the former SEAL nodded, acknowledging that his radio was out of commission, as well.

“We’re in for a rough one,” McCarter muttered as the gunfire suddenly died out. “Or maybe not…”

“One side’s run out of targets,” James commented. “We’re never lucky enough for both sides to finish each other off.”

“There’s always a first time,” McCarter mused.

“Yeah, right. I don’t see you running out willy-nilly,” James returned.

The Phoenix leader nodded, but he still took the lead as he moved toward the stairs. The old apartment building was pre-elevator technology, so its center was a spiral staircase decorated with black wrought iron that twisted from the ground to the upper floors. McCarter’s ears were peeled for the sound of movement above, and he checked the steps. They were made of stone, so they wouldn’t bend and creak like wooden slat stairs, meaning that they simply had to keep their footsteps soft and careful.

He moved up with catlike grace, James following several steps behind, preventing the pair from bunching up to be caught in the same burst or pattern of buckshot. McCarter, in the lead, knew he’d get most of the enemy attention, but despite his earlier assessment of how he’d matured in terms of no longer being impatient and addicted to action, he still was a man who led from the front, taking even more risks than those he assigned his own men. He had no illusions that he was bulletproof or immortal, but he knew his skills, equipment and reflexes. McCarter wasn’t the kind of man to boast, yet he knew his odds of surviving a close combat situation were among the best of anyone on the planet.

Calvin James hung back for another reason: he’d supplemented his P-90 subgun with a sawed-off shotgun with a dull orange stock. The coloration wasn’t a matter of fashion, but rather a means of telling this particular weapon from a live, fully-lethal 12-gauge. The orange-stocked weapon had a tube magazine, and its threaded sling was loaded with less-lethal munitions, specifically designed for the purpose of rendering opponents incapable of fighting while still leaving them available for subsequent questioning. Less lethal was not a guarantee, and if James had to kill in his defense, he’d be able to end a foe’s existence with a direct hit to the face. Still, the majority of the loads were high-intensity neoprene slugs, flexible enough to yield when they struck flesh without penetration, but possessing all the horsepower of a regular slug. James had taken hits to the chest with one as part of his familiarization with the round’s effects, and even through body armor, his chest was blackened with bruises.

Right now, however, the first three rounds were “ferrets,” or compact capsicum suspension dispersal shells that could punch through a windshield or a door and vomit out several dozen cubic feet of tear gas. Capsicum was another effective tool in taking foes off guard, denying them their sight and smell, as well as limiting their ability to speak as their mucus membranes inflamed at the touch of the raw, powerful pepper extract. Bezoar needed to be taken down, and it would be beneficial to Stony Man to figure out who had spirited the mad scientist out of Syria and into Europe.

“Let ’em have it,” McCarter said in a stage whisper to James, and the Phoenix Force medic brought up the stubby shotgun, working the slide and trigger of the weapon as fast as he could, spearing the trio of ferret rounds toward the fourth and top floor of the building. Thick, cottony white smoke roiled from their points of impact, immediately followed by a fit of coughing and wheezing.

A figure stumbled into the open, his head wrapped in dark cloth, a machine pistol locked in both of his fists. McCarter reacted to the man’s sudden appearance with well-honed, lightning-fast reflexes. A snarl of 5.8 mm rounds tore into the gunman just before the tear-gas-resistant foe could pull the trigger. While the FN P-90 didn’t throw fat or heavy slugs, its lightweight projectiles moved at 850 meters per second and carried 540 joules per bullet. When McCarter opened up at 800 rounds per minute, ripping five shots into the gunman, ribs shattered and flesh parted as the high-velocity projectiles created havoc. With his lungs and aorta reduced to ribbons of slashed tissue, the only thing that the would-be killer was able to do was to tumble headfirst over the railing.

McCarter hoped that the hardman was instantly dead; otherwise the crushing impacts against the rails of the spiral staircase would have been additionally agonizing, limbs folded with ugly crunches as his mass and velocity vectors proved far too much for his skeleton to withstand. Forty feet down, Bezoar’s hired gun stopped violently, his corpse accordioning against the floor, spine compressing, discs sliding off to the side from each other in their effort to accept gravity’s loving embrace.

“It’s not the fall—it’s the sudden stop,” McCarter mused to himself.

Other defenders had donned some manner of clothing to shield their nostrils and eyes from the brutal effects of the tear gas, but none had been so quick and efficient as to be able to charge out with their guns ready to blaze like their recently departed comrade.

As he took the steps three at a time, McCarter bounded to finish this encounter with the enemy shooters before the Parisian gendarmes arrived with a few heavily armed assault teams. While Phoenix Force proved that it was able to fight its way out of some of the most hostile environments in the world, getting into a direct conflict with lawmen only doing their job was something that the Stony Man warriors wanted to avoid at all costs. Shooting a soldier on the same side was a moral choice that each had taken. While that moral choice was made flexible in dealing with corrupt and crooked lawmen or troops, the French counterterrorism police were allies in the same cause.

With that in mind, McCarter let the P-90 drop to the end of its sling, withdrawing a collapsible ASP baton. He flicked his wrist, and the high-tensile steel tubes telescoped to their full length with an ominous snap. The sound caught the attention of one of the masked thugs, and he turned, drawing up his Steyr TMP machine pistol to deal with the sudden attack. McCarter batted aside the enemy gunman’s barrel with one swipe of the locked baton, using the rebound off the gun’s polymer frame to guide his next strike, a jaw-shattering stroke that whipped the cloth from his face.

McCarter could see that the enemy had East Asian features in the brief flutter of freed-up cloth, but he kicked the stunned or unconscious foe out of the way, whipping the point of the ASP down on the juncture between another gunman’s neck and shoulder. Nerves overloaded under the assault, bringing a wail of pain from his target. A third gunner with a pistol was bowled over by a neoprene slug from James’s shotgun, the three-quarter-inch cylinder of hard rubber breaking bones as the Phoenix medic hit the man right in the sternum.

James didn’t wait to see if his target would stay down because the pistol hadn’t fallen from nerveless fingers. The less-lethal shotgun proved quite deadly as James put another rubber baton round into the defender’s face, blood squirting from his eye sockets.

McCarter had no time to comment on the gruesome demise as he was dealing with the fourth enemy soldier, lashing this one under his arm to make him drop his firearm. Instead of bringing the ASP around to administer a coup de grâce, the Briton jammed the heel of his palm under his opponent’s chin, whipping his head back violently. The last of the defenders in this doorway were littering the walkway, their battered forms providing grim testimony to the efficiency of Phoenix Force.

McCarter let the baton drop to the floor, swinging his P-90 back into his grasp.

Lifeless bodies were strewed around the room, only one man still sitting upright. His white shirt was a bloody mess, and while at first blush he would have resembled Bezoar, a mouth full of mangled and busted false teeth yawned from the gaping gash of his lips. Bezoar’s file read that he had perfect teeth and no dental work done to improve them.

This guy was a fake, and he was holding on to an unmistakable D-shaped object.

A dead man’s switch equipped with a trigger that its wielder held down. Upon death and the relaxation of his fingers, whatever charge it was connected to would detonate.

The bloody, cap-filled smile broadened with the sight of McCarter and James. “And so…Paris dies.”

A second later he was a corpse, head flopping forward, the dead man’s switch tumbling to the cold tile floor….




CHAPTER FIVE


David McCarter saw the dead man’s switch begin to fall from the lifeless hand of a man who claimed Paris was about to die. His reaction was immediate and swift. He dropped his gun and leaped across the room, fingers clenching around the loosening fist of the corpse, keeping the pressure on the switch before it could activate.

“Cal! Get Gary now!” McCarter shouted. “I can’t squeeze this geezer’s digits all night!”

Calvin James took in the scene with a glance, then pivoted on his heel. McCarter could see that his partner was trying to raise someone on the hands-free radio even as he rushed to get the others, but communications had been knocked out.

It was a no-sweater for McCarter. The team was well coordinated, and had gotten along without the use of their hands-free communications nets before. The members of Phoenix Force hadn’t been chosen because of their ability to get along aided by some of the best high-tech equipment and intelligence in the world. It was their ability to improvise when cut off from all other assets, relying on their vast wealth of skills and experience to minimize chances of failure and succeed where all else was lost.

Still, McCarter couldn’t sit on the dead man’s switch indefinitely. The gunfire and explosions had to have attracted the attention of the Paris police, and no matter what, they would not take kindly to the Briton holding on to the trigger of a device that could unleash damnation upon their city, friendly or not. Barbara Price had been able to bail the Stony Man warriors out of trouble with local law enforcement before, but some incidents would be just too much and focus far too much attention on what was supposed to be one of the most covert operations in the world.

McCarter recognized Manning’s tread as he raced up the stairs, and checked his mental clock.

“You must have broken position as soon as the radios went out,” McCarter mused as the big Canadian came through the door.

“Cal met me halfway. He said you were hanging on to a dead man’s switch,” Manning replied, ignoring his friend and commander’s comment.

McCarter shrugged. “What can I say? I’ve always wanted to hold hands with a corpse.”

Manning looked at the device, then at the lifeless figure whom McCarter shared it with. “This could be one of two types of switches. One is that it transmits when it is released, in which case, our asses are safe, so long as they didn’t booby-trap the power supply. The other is that it is transmitting, and we’re on a countdown until the batteries fail, no matter how well we duct tape the trigger shut.”

McCarter looked at it. “Considering that there’s a jammer knocking out our radios, I’m not sure this is a live transmission that’ll stop once the lever’s depressed.”

Manning’s brow furrowed as he looked at it. “Perhaps it’s on a shielded frequency, or the jammer isn’t operating on that level.”

“T.J. should be working our scanner to see which frequencies are open,” McCarter said, referring to the radio communications bands. “Unless he’s too busy…”

“He’s on it,” Manning returned. “He can keep an ear out for the cops while checking the scanner. In fact, he’s determined that police bands are untouched by the jamming. We’d be on that wavelength, too, but…”

“Yeah, yeah,” McCarter said. “The geezer I’m all chummy with said that when this goes off, Paris dies.”

Manning leaned in closer to look at the crude electronic device. “David, you should know that I can perform multiple mental tasks simultaneously. Not to cast aspersions on…”

McCarter waited for Manning’s lecture to finish, but the trailed-off sentence set his nerves on edge.

“What is it?” McCarter asked.

“T.J. managed to hit a clear channel for us. He says that Cal and Rafe located the �bomb,’” Manning said.

“I don’t like that you made it sound as if �bomb’ were in quotes,” McCarter replied.

“Come on,” Manning said. He pulled out his combat knife and severed the dead man’s hand at the wrist, allowing them to take the trigger along with them to the roof.

“The roof?” McCarter asked. Manning reached over and reset the frequency on his hands-free radio.

“We’ve got three tanks up here,” Encizo said as the two men arrived at the top of the building. Their Cuban ally had just torn open an air-conditioning unit and McCarter could see the canisters within the remnants of the housing. “We’re lucky that no one put a bullet through one.”

“Nerve gas?” McCarter asked as he stepped closer to the bomb. The canisters had been united by a bit of electronics with spray nozzles that pointed up into the night sky.

“There’s not an agency or military in the world that doesn’t have biohazard markings on their nerve gas delivery systems,” James said. “Besides, these are traditional helium canisters, and as far as I can tell, they haven’t been reloaded. They’re fresh and unrecycled.”

McCarter looked at the device that connected the three tanks. “What kind of dispersal could three helium tanks give to a spore or other pathogen?”

“I’m seeing we can get close to thirty square miles, effectively infecting all of Paris,” Manning returned.

“Guys,” Hawkins interjected over the radio. “I’m monitoring the police bands, and we’re not gettin’ any attention. They’ve got calls about fireworks going off, not gunfire.”

McCarter and Manning looked at each other quizzically. “Staying away from this place under orders…like they know something bad is about to happen here,” McCarter added.

Manning nodded. “T.J….”

“I’m checking the scope for encrypted comms, and just linked up with the Farm,” Hawkins answered. “They’ve got satellites looking down on the city, and there are no aircraft heading our way, marked or unmarked.”

“Doesn’t mean that they can’t be arriving in a black van or two,” Manning noted.

“My head’s on a swivel down here,” Hawkins replied. “Want to defuse whatever that thing is so we can beat feet?”

“Absolutely,” Encizo agreed. “The longer we sit here thumbing our asses…”

Manning reached out to the box, his powerful yet sensitive fingertips caressing a smaller rectangular component on the side of it. With a powerful wrench of his wrist, the module popped off into his grasp and he closed his fist tight around it. Slender sheet metal buckled, the silicone board within popping as it was crushed in his powerful hand. “You can let go of the trigger now, David.”

“How did you know it wasn’t set to go off when its antenna was removed?” McCarter asked.

“It was just big enough to hold a transceiver, no booby traps. There’s nothing inside of this part of the device that could trigger the dispersant without a regular command,” Manning said.

McCarter nodded. “Get that shit off the helium tanks fast. We’re taking it back with us.”

Encizo spoke up. “You told us the guy holding that trigger said Paris would die.”

James frowned as he leaned back, slipping a small tube into his vest. “Helium under high pressure was the dispersant. I’ve got the nozzles on both ends of the device sealed with epoxy.”

“The superglue that you use to close minor cuts?” Manning asked.

James nodded. “Works on closing off tubing pretty well, too. It should retain its seal for a good stretch.”

“Find a means of hermetically sealing it, too,”

McCarter said. “T.J., any more news?”

“I’m on my way up. A black van just pulled into view,” Hawkins answered. “I made certain they didn’t see me enter the building.”

“We’re roofing it,” Encizo muttered.

McCarter tossed aside the severed hand, but kept the trigger unit, slipping it into a pouch for future study. If anyone could learn the origin of this particular bomb, it would be Gary Manning, if his keen observation of the strange dispersal unit hadn’t already raised a few clues and flags.

For now, James had bound the device in a thermal blanket, duct taping the neck of the metallic cloth shut as it wrapped around the boxy unit. For something no larger than a shoebox, David McCarter didn’t want to imagine what kind of monstrosity was within.

If one tiny bit was more than enough to kill a city, how much had Bezoar produced to deal with the whole world?

McCarter put such grim thoughts aside as he leaped from rooftop to rooftop, crossing the gaps between the tightly spaced buildings as he and the others trekked in a roundabout path to return to their own transportation.



HERMANN SCHWARZ KNELT at the edge of the bomb crater, looking around the scene with concern at the randomness of the single blast. The town of Albion, now a silent hole in the ground, had been nailed with several thousand-pound high-intensity bombs, turning the area into a lifeless wound in the Iowan countryside.

His credentials read FBI Bomb Squad, as did the identification for Lyons and Blancanales, but he was the only member of their team who had more than enough scientific background and qualification to study the forensics of a high-powered blast.

“Why here?” Schwarz asked.

“Maybe they missed?” Lyons offered. “As far as smart bombs go, sometimes one or two stray off course during a salvo.”

“You don’t think it was a miss, though,” Blancanales added.

Schwarz shook his head, then stepped back. On his CPDA screen, he’d had a detailed report of Trooper Robespierre’s observations. “This was a fruit stand that had turned into an apocalypse, according to our state cop.”

“Trooper,” Lyons corrected.

Schwarz looked at the Able Team leader, and was about to say something, when he remembered his own short response and correction of technical terms when Lyons made a mistake. “Trooper.”

“There had been a gunfight here,” Blancanales said. He’d read the report, as well. All of the federal agents on the scene were aware of what Robespierre had reported. Still, most of the investigation work was done around the shell-shocked town of Albion.

“Shell-shocked” wasn’t the right term, Schwarz corrected himself. A bombarded town described as shell-shocked had pockets of destruction, survivors, damaged buildings. The wave of destruction that had come down on the tiny ville was complete. Not a single splinter of the town was still standing, bodies more than simply pulped, but incinerated and reduced to component atoms.

So far, no one had claimed responsibility for the bombing, the end of hundreds of American lives.

“Trooper Robespierre described something akin to a food riot, according to what was left over here,” Lyons continued. “People rushed this fruit stand, and the owner opened fire. There was at least one casualty, and then the stand owner fell, literally torn apart, as if by an animal.”

Lyons looked at his Combat PDA, pulling up dash camera images from the wrecked cruiser. The digital footage had been grainy, but Aaron Kurtzman had done his technical magic, providing Able Team with a clearer picture of the situation. “They didn’t shoot the fruit stand owner with a shotgun. There’s no burns or stippling such as from contact-range shots with a 12-gauge.”

“So he was bitten and clawed apart?” Blancanales asked as he looked at the image Lyons referenced. “What, is this another group of crazies who think they’re zombies?”

“I don’t think anyone was pretending in this case,” Schwarz said.

“Me, either. Look at this one. She’s on the ground and her throat is distended, bulging with obstructions,” Lyons said. “Kurtzman wasn’t able to make out what is sticking from her mouth, but I’ll bet you anything that she tried to swallow something whole.”

“Throat and belly, that shirt’s coming open across her stomach,” Blancanales added.

Schwarz leaned in to look at the picture Lyons had on display. His lips pulled into a tight line, disappearing under his mustache. “Even at their hungriest, people don’t try to eat each other,” Schwarz said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“They weren’t trying to eat each other,” Lyons said. “This was simply a gone-feral attack. He had a shotgun, and the rioters used the only weapons that they had—their teeth and nails.”

Blancanales looked at the crater. “So the bomb was dropped here to prevent an autopsy.”

“Even so, how would anyone be certain that things didn’t spread, didn’t get out of hand?” Schwarz asked.

“The same way the bombs were delivered,” Lyons answered. “Aerial vehicles, manned or unmanned.”

“That seems obvious enough, but you’d think that Albion’s residents would have noticed extra aircraft hanging around,” Schwarz mused. “I’ve had the Farm pull the FAA records about crop dusting in this part of the state, and none of the pilots even mentioned so much as a UFO.”

Lyons looked at the blast crater again. “Maybe someone made use of local talent.”

“Local pilots might work, but wouldn’t they get suspicious?” Schwarz asked. “Could you drop a bunch of bombs on this town for us?”

“It wouldn’t have to be as vulgar as that,” Blancanales said.

“Observation during routine flights,” Schwarz replied.

“It’d work for me,” Lyons said. “That way you keep the bombers in reserve, but your experiment doesn’t breach the security protocols.”

“An experiment in what?” Blancanales asked.




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