Seismic Surge

It turned out that Blancanales had made the right choice, because the staggered killer scrambled back to his feet a second time, but he wasn’t standing still to be the target for further full-auto hammering. Even as the gunman retreated, two more riflemen opened up, their rifles chattering and pelting the hunk of rubble that Blancanales used as a shield. Unfortunately for them, they missed, bullets smashing against mass too dense for their 5.56 mm rounds to penetrate, and Blancanales had mapped out a line of retreat in case he was attacked from that vector.

Blancanales paused just enough to unclip another of his grenades from a small fanny pack. He plucked the cotter pin and released the spoon, igniting the blaster’s fuse before hurling it toward the rattle of enemy weapons. There was a brief pause in the shooting, accompanied by an almost comical cry of “Shit!”

The humor of the moment was punctuated by the earth-shattering roar of the grenade’s detonation, body parts spiraling away from the source of the well-placed blast. A distant explosion hadn’t been able to shred through a steel helmet and trauma plates, but the enemy commandos didn’t have that kind of hard shell on their legs. Even if they did, a sheet of kinetic force severed the limbs where the joints in the armor were weakest.

“We’re hoping to get one or two alive, remember,” Schwarz said grimly.

“Acknowledged,” Blancanales replied. “Let’s hope they have the same orders.”

The stunned and wounded gunner, having survived two attempts at putting him down, became Blancanales’s focus. He was leaving a blood trail, which meant at least one of the prior attacks had caused him injury. Once hurt, he’d be easier to take down.

With his target in sight, Blancanales rushed forward, keeping out of the fields of fire of the enemy gunners, zagging toward the downed commando. He reloaded the MP-7 on the run, the magazine-in-grip design making it easier for his left hand to find the well that his right was wrapped around. It was so easy he could do it blindfolded, and since he hadn’t run the SMG into slide-lock, he knew he had a round chambered.

A gunman edged into the open in front of the wily veteran commando, looking to cover his fallen friend. He also happened to have a device that was decidedly not an assault weapon in his hands. Blancanales only barely had a few instants of warning before he dived beneath the twin barbs of an underbarrel-mounted Taser. The wires fell across his shoulders, but as they were insulated to contain the voltage that had been directed toward whatever had been stuck by the pair of darts, the charge in the slender threads was impotent against him.

That couldn’t be said for the weapon atop the Taser, an M-4 assault rifle. The killer figured that if he couldn’t take Blancanales as a prisoner, then he’d simply open fire and remove him as a threat. Blancanales didn’t sit still for this, however. He rolled onto his back, getting himself out of the path of the initial burst of rifle fire, triggering the H&K MP-7 at the man’s shins. The 4.6 mm bullets didn’t contain a lot of mass, but as they were composed of dense slugs launched at more than 2400 feet per second, they struck the enemy gunner hard, splintering bone and muscle everywhere between his knees and ankles.

Without the ability to stand, the gunman collapsed onto his stunned friend, going from rescuer to restraint.

“Ironman!” Blancanales called. “Cover me! Two prisoners at four o’clock.”

Lyons would know that Blancanales would always put his position at two hours fast; it was one way that Able Team was able to engage in out-loud communication of their location without actually betraying where they actually were in relation to each other. Lyons opened up with his big .357 Magnum, firing three shots rapid-fire, drawing heat away from his partner even as his rounds tagged an enemy in his body armor. Trauma plates deflected the more lethal portion of Lyons’s salvo, but it was enough to convince the gunman to retreat back behind cover.

Lyons grimaced as he snapped open the cylinder, ejecting his spent brass and feeding in a special 8-round .357 Magnum speed-loader. The gun was back in action in two seconds, but before he left cover, Schwarz was at his side, handing him the MP-7 he’d ceded earlier.

“We don’t need to use kid gloves anymore. Punch through the armor and finish this fight,” Schwarz said.

Lyons smirked. “Never would have thought of that myself.”

He snapped open the stock and folded down the foregrip on the machine pistol. A 20-round magazine sat flush with the bottom of the grip, so he dumped it and slid home a 40-rounder. “What’s the estimate on how many left?”

Schwarz scanned around. “Three here, but there are still the drivers and vehicle security who could be coming in as backup.”

“That’s why you dropped off my MP-7,” Lyons said.

“Gonna head them off,” Schwarz said.

With that, the electronics genius disappeared from sight. Whatever the brilliant Schwarz had in mind, it would be explosive and deadly.

“They secure?” Lyons asked Blancanales through his headset.

“Roger that.”

“Keep your head down, too,” Lyons ordered.

With that, he lobbed a pair of flash-bang grenades in the direction of the enemy’s fire. They had split up, two in one group with a long gunner trying to flank. Lyons knew that he wouldn’t have much of an opportunity, even with the blinding and deafening force of the twin shock bombs. The headgear they wore would mitigate much of the force, but Lyons’s throws had been true. He was counting on a close-range burst of light and sound to buy him a few seconds.

He was up and firing, catching a fleeting touch of the bang. The two gunners he’d targeted as one clump were staggered where they stood, and Lyons poured on the heat from his machine pistol. The 40-round magazine disappeared in the space of seconds, but the Able Team commander had found every weak point in his opponents’ armor, punching bullets deep into their vitals. The lifeless men dropped their weapons, slumping to the ground.

As they fell, the last of the gunners was recovering from the concussion grenade that had rocked him. That mercenary was on Lyons’s flank, right in his blind spot. With a clear shot and no other enemies in sight, the rifleman took an extra moment to line up on the “vulnerable” Lyons when the thunder and bellow of Blancanales’s Smith and Wesson .45 erupted from ground level.

The shooter dropped his weapon as two 230-grain slugs struck him in one hip, shattering bone and snapping his pelvis. The twin slugs mushroomed on impact, going from just under half of an inch to a full three quarters of an inch of blossomed lead and copper. The duo of hammer blows tore an ugly, brutal channel through the gunman’s groin, breaking his other hip on the way out.

Paralyzed, he collapsed, almost face-to-face with the prone Blancanales.

One more stroke of the trigger, and the ambusher’s face disappeared, imploding under the thunderous impact of a third .45-caliber round.

Lyons knew that Blancanales had a line of sight on the last of the gunmen, having dealt with the men he’d take prisoner before backing him up.

In the distance, the unmistakable roar of plastic explosives split the air.

“You done there?” Lyons asked Schwarz via the headset.

“Grab a prisoner and rendezvous,” Schwarz answered. “We toss our guys into the back of our van, and Pol drives it to the safe house. We grab the other vehicles and bring them in and rip them apart for forensic evidence.”

“Sirens,” Blancanales said. “We made a hell of a lot of noise.”

“Grab one of these fools and let’s go,” Lyons suggested. “Hopefully the Farm’s screwing with police communications so we have a route out of here.”

“If so, good. If not, I’ll cut us a path without hurting any cops,” Blancanales replied.

“I’m counting on that.”

With that, Able Team rushed away from the Norfolk boatyard, prisoners in tow. They were gone with only seconds to spare when the police arrived, looking upon the carnage wrought by their explosive presence.

In the upcoming days, the Norfolk Police and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service would wonder what caused this brutal spat of violence, but would soon be distracted by yet more violence. Able Team was on the case, and they were up against a deadly conspiracy that was bringing far more to the fight than just guns.

CHAPTER TWO

Calvin James and Rafael Encizo checked over the scuba kits of the three partners, David McCarter, Gary Manning and T. J. Hawkins, even as the silo the five men stood within filled with seawater up to their knees. James was a scuba expert thanks to Navy SEAL training, while a lifetime of maritime salvage employment had honed Encizo into a master diver. As such, they took it upon themselves to perform safety checks on the rest of the team’s equipment. It was almost paranoid the way that they double-checked their partner’s preparations, but neither man wanted to take a chance with the lives of their dearest friends.

“All right, Mom!” T. J. Hawkins quipped as James manhandled his scuba tank. “If you fuss any more over me, I’ll miss the damn bus and you’ll have to drive me to school yourself.”

“Language, motherfucker!” James snapped back. “I’ll wash your fucking mouth out with soap.”

This back-and-forth solicited chuckles from the others even as they clamped the nozzles of their bubble lists’ self-contained breathing systems between their teeth. The packs that the five men wore were larger than standard scuba gear, but the extra bulk would prove to be worth its weight. Not only would the scrubber chamber in the system recycle their air, allowing for nearly limitless time under water, but the lack of bubbles would also lower their profile, making any approach from beneath the waves even stealthier. Under water, the extra mass would be less of a burden. Any additional effort would be further alleviated by the Swimmer Delivery Vehicle or SDV, an underwater equivalent of a convertible sports car meant for cutting through the depths with the “top down” at a speed far faster than any man could swim.

The silo was full of water now, and the pressure inside was equal to that outside of the submarine, making it easier to open the hatch and less of a shock when the five men exited the nuke sub to reach the SDV. The undersea craft from the U.S. Navy had brought them close to the hospitable island of La Palma, one of the most popular tourist spots in the Spanish Canary Islands. The sub had powered across the Atlantic at its maximum speed after picking up the members of Phoenix Force when they had been transferred from a helicopter launched from an aircraft carrier just off the coast of Virginia.

For now the rest of the United States Navy was still organizing an emergency blockade around the vacation spot besieged by terrorists. Both the United States Marine Corps and U.S. Navy SEALs were on full alert and ready to engage in hostage rescue, but were held at bay by the threat of deadly charges set in volcanic fissures on the caldera that made up the heart of the island. Local hotels were also packed with thousands of captive tourists rigged to explode. In the White House, the President knew that any conventional military intervention would result in lost lives, and the same threat stayed the hands of British and Spanish amphibious forces. Fortunately for the President of the United States, he was aware of the one group capable of being able to move in quietly, with all the training and flexibility to overcome even insane odds. That was the agency known as the Sensitive Operations Group, a top-secret facility stationed at Stony Man Farm, which boasted one of the most incredible cybertechnology information-gathering services in the world and two of the most elite combat teams ever to engage in warfare—Able Team and Phoenix Force.

The five Phoenix Force operatives swam to their stealth sled. The fifteen-foot-long craft looked like a torpedo whose center had been peeled open. The two aquatic jet engines were contained in the belly of the SDV, which could push through the depths at upwards of twenty-five knots. Because of that relative speed, a huge nosecone and windshield were in place to keep the water from pushing on the riders with great force. Ordinarily the SDV was meant for Navy SEAL commandos, so James and Encizo had stowed their armaments in purpose-built compartments on the vehicle. Both Phoenix Force divers were already familiar with the controls and operation of the SDV.

The La Palma terrorists had warned that if any covert-

operations teams were sighted on the island, and harmed any member of their force, the hotel jammed with upward of one thousand frightened tourists would be demolished.

Phoenix Force needed to plan their infiltration with extreme care. Though they brought with them suppressed submachine guns for later use, when hard contact was unavoidable, their most important weapons would be Manning’s air rifle, an assortment of knives and impact weapons and a pair of Barnett commando crossbows. Of these so-called silent weapons, Manning’s air rifle was the quietest. Unless they had disarmed the explosives threatening the tourists, any gunfight would be the absolute last resort. The darts fired from Manning’s air rifle were loaded with Thorazine, which would almost instantly put an enemy to sleep. This would allow them to have live prisoners to interrogate. However, if things tended toward a worsening situation, Manning also had a supply of deadly poison darts.

James slid behind the controls of the SDV, and with a jolt the impulse jets kicked in.

Gary Manning, due to his expertise in demolitions and engineering, had been among the group of Stony Man geniuses who had run equations regarding the consequences of a detonation. The other members of the scientific team had included Hermann Schwarz, Aaron Kurtzman, the Farm’s cyberteam leader, and several other Stony Man Farm experts. Every physics simulation, every math equation and every program told the same story. A detonation in the right spot along the cliffs making up the outer ring of the volcanic caldera would create a mammoth landslide, which would drop into the Atlantic with more than enough force and momentum to unleash a hemisphere-wide seismic event. Coastal cities would be flooded as far inland as fifteen miles, and any harbor facilities would be destroyed beyond repair.

During the 2011 earthquake in Japan, the world had seen the raw, unmitigated power of the tsunami against the modern coastline. Entire towns and cities had been carved from the land, either bulldozed miles inland or sucked into the Pacific. The tsunami that would be unleashed by the landslide in La Palma would be like that, except that it would stretch to England, Spain and Portugal, and from Maine to Florida. It would be the tragedy of Japan multiplied many times with no fewer than twenty-two million estimated casualties in the United States and Canada alone.

The terrorists hadn’t said what they wanted in concrete terms, just the hell that would be unleashed if a rescue attempt was initiated for the hostages. The tidal-wave plan had been discovered by Stony Man Farm only after hours of intensive search to identify the island’s tactical or strategic value. Nothing else could have motivated such a hostile takeover.

All of this data had come in the form of a white paper that postulated the deadly tsunami. Written by the Jeopardy Corporation, the paper was discovered by Hal Brognola, the Farm’s director and White House liaison. Brognola had the job of giving the President the vital news about the actual purpose behind the takeover. Now, the leader of the free world faced two problems, balancing the lives of thousands of tourists, many of them American, against the lives of millions of Europeans

and billions of dollars of infrastructure that would be damaged. Either way the blow delivered would be catastrophic.

The Man couldn’t choose to let either the hostages or the nation come to harm, so he had turned to the Sensitive Operations Group based at the Stony Man Farm. Led by Brognola, the counterterrorism teams could strike around the globe, neutralizing threats to the entire Free World.

* * *

PHOENIX FORCE RODE their SDV beneath the waves, heading into the jaws of death. Their counterparts, Able Team, were back in the United States checking the damage wrought upon the Jeopardy Corporation by an unknown force, most likely the same one that was at work at La Palma.

As the SDV powered toward the hostage island, James kept it low, close to the ocean floor to avoid being seen on sonar. They were at a depth so that even the noon sun was dimmed to the point where it was like dusk. They needed headlights, but were able to use them unseen from the surface due to the massive water above them. The Phoenix Force warriors were watching for signs of other undersea craft or magnetic antiship mines when they saw the grisly collection of figures on the seabed.

James and Encizo knew that the corpses hadn’t been down here very long as there was still tissue on their bodies. Meat, especially carrion, on the ocean floor often ended up in the bellies of crustaceans or fish. Indeed, the lifeless bodies were identifiable as men or women.

The estimation of the time that the bodies had been down here was undermined by the stilled forms of crabs and small fish scattered around the bodies. The corpses had nibbles, small bites in them, but once it was learned that others who ate from the carrion died instantly, the rest of the undersea scavengers avoided the deadly meals.

This was an ominous indication of how the poor souls had died. Somewhere, likely while they had been moored on tranquil waters just above their current position, the collection of dead had been afflicted by nerve gas, most likely a type that was absorbed through skin. The deadly toxins would make the corpses a lethal last meal for the carrion eaters who normally seized upon fresh flesh drifting to the bottom.

McCarter tapped James on the shoulder, then pushed himself from his seat. James grimaced, teeth clenched around his mouth gauge. The rules of extravehicular activity on the SDV had been decided beforehand, and first among them was that no more than one diver would be apart from the sled at a time. This was a just-in-case policy, something that would reduce the risks to the Phoenix Force swimmers. McCarter’s lone probe into the strewed corpses and poisoned sea life could only be supported by the swivel lamp mounted next to Encizo.

The only consolation that James had was that the SDV could linger, thanks to the oxygen recycling in the bubble-less systems.

McCarter was able to make out more detail as he swam closer to the dead. He could tell that they were all relatively young, in their twenties and thirties, and to a body, none of them wore a stitch of clothing above their waists. In life, they must have been fit, beautiful, though the cold waters had lent a bloated complexion to each of them as he took images with his underwater digital camera. He was also able to peg their nationalities as predominantly American, mostly thanks to the fact that the men wore “board shorts,” surfing wear that was loose, airy and comfortable, as opposed to the European preference for tighter, more revealing swimwear.

The dead had also come from a private cruise, since the women were all topless, yet with American males. It had been a party among friends, where the girls had felt confident enough and comfortable in baring their breasts to one and all. That hadn’t kept them from showing some modesty as several had gossamer-thin wraps tied around their waists.

McCarter grunted, feeling a dark consolation that these poor kids had passed quickly, thanks to the nerve gas. They undoubtedly died in agony, but they hadn’t been molested before or after their demise. The bodies of the women were free of bruising indicative of rape or post-mortem activity, further evidence of the dangerous toxins absorbed through their bare skin.

He swam to the bodies of the men and began searching through pockets after he took digital photos of their slack, cold faces. One of them might have had the presence of mind to pack a wallet or some other form of identification, but instead he found seawater-corroded cell phones and unopened foil packets of condoms. It had taken five tries to get a good, old-fashioned wallet, and he also found a more modern design, a stainless-steel model that sealed money and cards inside, safe from sweat or immersion while surfing or swimming.

Having found some ID, McCarter returned to the sled, not quite happy, but nor was he despondent. The Navy would be directed to these GPS coordinates to recover the lost and perhaps bring them home for proper burial. Right now, however, he had the means of giving closure to the families of the dead.

With grim resolve, McCarter buckled into his seat. He no longer saw the victims of La Palma as an abstract. There were faces, and those faces could be turned to names. The victims of the hostage takers, no matter what their incentive for violence, had been slain in the prime of their lives. He’d seen them, touched them and knew that they were gone forever, even if their remains were pulled from the cold, dark depths at the bottom of the Atlantic.

They had come here in life, looking for joy and camaraderie and romance. Instead, they had been murdered.

It wouldn’t be up to him to piece together names and faces caught on his digital camera, but he could only imagine what horrors had befallen them in the last moments of their lives.

McCarter grit his teeth tighter around the mouthpiece of his rebreather. The murderous bastards were going to pay. He may not have been the raging berserker Carl Lyons of Able Team, but he sure as hell had come close in his days before assuming the responsibility of leading Phoenix Force. Even though he was calmer now, he still held a spot in his heart for anger, loathing, soul-crushing rage against those who slaughtered helpless innocents. And he’d squeeze all of that out in bloody retribution against these killers.

CHAPTER THREE

The three men of Phoenix Force surfaced along the western coast of the island of La Palma in darkness. They paused to give the shore a good scan with binoculars and laser range finders that were carried on the SDV. Over their satellite link to Stony Man Farm, they double-checked their position and sought a real-time infrared photograph of the rocky shore ahead of them. The shore was in a province of the island called Tazacorte, which was fairly sparsely populated. There was only one post office and one school for the whole area, as well as a port, which they had surfaced near. Most of the province was unreachable thanks to a sixty-meter elevation where the cliff fell off rapidly into the ocean, but that wouldn’t be a hindrance to Phoenix Force.

They were still going to land a mile to the south of Tarajal, which was a popular marina for tourists and locals alike. They wanted to stay out of sight of the native population and the mercenaries, if they were active in this part of the island. That meant that they would climb a rocky cliff and cut across the sparsely populated banana plantations that topped the oceanfront cliffs.

There were tourist-oriented beaches, such as the Playa del Puerto. A seaside promenade with restaurants and beach facilities was present. Farther south, there was Los Guirres o El Volcán, which was wild in nature, isolated, but a favorite spot for surfers who wanted to get off the beaten path. All along, they could make out the black volcanic sands that made the island so well known and striking.

McCarter joined in on the scan of the Spanish marina. “Looks like a lot of the locals got in their boats and took off.”

“I don’t see much in way of an armed presence either way,” Encizo said.

“That means bugger all. We’ve got a submarine loaded with guns and explosives, and we look like bumps on the waves,” McCarter countered. “And don’t forget that a cruise ship turned out to be a missile-launching Q-ship that took over Santa Cruz harbor.”

“That’s over the spine of the island,” Encizo said. “But they might have some kind of presence here, especially since we’re that much closer to Cumbre Vieja.”