Critical Intelligence

“Keep an eye out for our Korean guest,” Lyons told Blancanales.

The ex-Green Beret nodded and continued sweeping his scope across the camp below them, hunting for targets of opportunity. Lyons opened up with his M-60E and directed suppressive fire on the FARC compound.

JACK GRIMALDI lifted the Blackhawk straight up out of the shallow jungle valley and bunny-hopped the bird over the hilltop. He put the nose of the helicopter down and raced forward, flying at treetop level. Two hundred yards out, his thumb flicked up the red safety cover to his rocket pod.

The FARC compound had two 20 mm antiaircraft emplacements providing security and they were Grimaldi’s first priority. He banked the bird hard, brought it on line with the narrow, fast-moving creek below and gunned the Blackhawk hard toward the camp.

His thumb depressed the button.

Instantly twin seven-inch rockets from pods under his weapons platform launched toward the camp. The projectiles whistled out, leaving contrails of white smoke behind them as they flew.

They both hit the sandbag walls encircling one of the 20 mm AA cannons and exploded. Gunny sacks, body parts and pieces of the guns went flying. Grimaldi worked his foot pedals and maneuvered the yoke. The Blackhawk banked hard, then spun around on its axis until the nose was orientated 120-degrees on a separate plane.

Through the windshield Grimaldi could see the antiaircraft crew scrambling to bring the 20 mm cannon to bear. Men’s faces twisted in fear and anger as they swarmed like ants around the gun placement. The helicopter remained level under Grimaldi’s hand. Again his thumb found the activation toggle.

Two more rockets leaped from their pods and swept forward, spiraling inward on synchronous flight paths. FARC gunners threw themselves out of the artillery pit in a desperate attempt to avoid the blast, but the twin explosions caught them in a concussive wave of lethal force.

“Here we go!” Grimaldi yelled into his throat mike.

The Blackhawk yawed hard, then settled into a hover fifty yards off the broken, uneven ground. Camouflage netting across the compound was ripped off and tossed into twisted heaps around the aluminum pole frame work, revealing men, sheds and tin-roofed buildings. A cloud of dust sprang up like fog as the topsoil was ripped from the ground by the force of rotor wash.

A thick hemp rope was kicked out of the cargo bay door. An instant later T. J. Hawkins, ex-Delta Force operator, appeared in the doorway. He wore a black sporting helmet and clear visors over his eyes. His hands were covered by thick welder’s gloves.

“Go! Go! Go!” David McCarter shouted.

Instantly, Hawkins stepped off the helicopter and onto the rope, sliding down the hemp weave like a firefighter on a pole. He was halfway down when the second man appeared in the door, then grasped the rope. Rafael Encizo, veteran anti-Castro guerrilla commando and combat diver, stepped off and dropped like a stone.

On the ground Hawkins shuffled forward a few places and took a knee, weapon coming up. Encizo dismounted the rope and took up a position to Hawkins’s left, his own weapon up as Calvin James, former Navy SEAL and trained medic, hit the rope.

Hawkins saw two men in Russian military fatigues run out of an outbuilding, weapons up. He drew down on them and used his M-4 carbine to cut them down.

Beside him Encizo unleashed his own firepower, an M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon, in stuttering bursts.

James hit the ground, bending at the knees to absorb the force of the impact, and a second later Gary Manning, former Canadian Special Forces soldier and explosives expert, also landed. The Canadian put his own M-60E in the pocket of his shoulder and fired over the heads of his teammates as he shuffled forward.

James peeled off to Encizo’s left, forming the anchor point on one end of their wedge formation as Manning shuffled into position on the opposite side. Behind them McCarter was on the ground, his M-4/M-203 combination carbine grenade launcher up and tracking for targets.

“Clear!” McCarter shouted.

The ex-SAS trooper walked smoothly forward, weapon up and finger on the trigger. Behind him the assault rope was disengaged by the helicopter loadmaster and door gunner, a sergeant from the 75th Ranger Division on loan to Stony Man’s blacksuit security detail.

“Copy!” Grimaldi responded.

The helicopter’s turbine engines screamed as the pilot climbed the bird up to a better altitude. The loadmaster/door gunner slid over behind an M-134 Gatling gun and rotated the barrel cluster around to bear on the compound.

“Advance,” McCarter directed.

Instantly the unit began shuffling forward, firing their weapons as they moved. Above them the Blackhawk drifted along, the 7.62 mm minigun firing ahead of them. The weapon’s massive rate of fire had twinkling, smoking hot shell casings dropping down on them like metal raindrops.

In front of them FARC soldiers tried desperately to mount a defense, but the triple impact of speed of attack, aggression of action and firepower coupled with surprise was proving more than they could deal with. FARC guerrillas soaked up bullets like sponges, were scythed in two or battered into submission.

Hawkins walked his muzzle in measured angles from left to right, dropping running, screaming targets with each squeeze of his trigger. Encizo used his SAW from the hip, triggering one short burst after the other. He saw a door to a long, low barracks-style building swing open and he took it under fire immediately. Red tracer fire arced through the opening and dropped a knot of FARC guerrillas.

“Able, do we have eyes on?” McCarter demanded through his com set. Beside him Manning used his M-60E to blast into an armored sedan being used as cover by a handful of enemy combatants.

“Negative,” Lyons replied. “To your five o’clock I have the command bunker.”

McCarter looked in the direction Lyons had indicated and, as if to punctuate the ex-cop’s directions, Schwarz put an 80 mm mortar round down on top of a jet-black armored BMW SUV parked near a concrete structure. The luxury sport vehicle went up like a Roman candle. A moment later another mortar went off.

“I have eyes on bunker,” McCarter answered. Beside him Gary Manning mowed down three FARC soldiers attempting to set up an RPK machine gun.

“Good,” Lyons replied. “Blancanales said he scoped our target entering the bunker twenty minutes ago.”

“En route,” McCarter confirmed.

Machine-gun fire erupted from just ahead and to the left of them. Bullets cut toward the assault force in a lethal wave. The concussive force of the heavy-caliber rounds cutting through the air next to their bodies buffeted Phoenix Force and they all went down in defensive sprawls.

“Machine gun, left!” Encizo called out.

The team looked toward the position and saw a reinforced foxhole with a sandbag roof. A .30-caliber machine gun burped out another burst as the gunner tried to find his range.

Manning, armed with his own machine gun, cut loose, trying to suppress the other gunner’s fire. His bullets gouged up furrows of earth just in front of the position and slapped into the dirt-filled sandbags, causing the FARC machine gunner to flinch.

Encizo lifted the barrel of his SAW and added to the maelstrom of fire.

McCarter used the barrage as cover enough to risk popping up to one knee. He tucked the butt of his M-4 into his shoulder and triggered his M-203 attachment. A 40 mm fléchette round shot from the barrel and arched like football into the enemy position.

A heavy bang sounded and smoke began roiling. Razor-sharp fléchette darts scissored into the machine gunner and his assistant, cutting the men to bloody ribbons.

Phoenix rose as one unit, weapons up. Manning stepped forward and unleashed the M-60E in a wide arc in front of them, spraying the camp in a crescent-moon pattern designed to keep other defenders from gaining momentum.

“Bunker!” McCarter yelled. “Gary and Rafe, cover!”

The two machine gunners ran forward and threw themselves down to give themselves overlapping fields of fire. Behind them the other three members of Phoenix Force prepared to storm the bunker.

CHAPTER FOUR

Inside the FARC command bunker Lieutenant Colonel Sin-Bok could hear the men outside screaming as they died. He was out of the way, in a corner, holding tightly to his attaché case and a .45-caliber M-1911 pistol Naranjo had provided him once the attack started.

Outside, bullets struck the bunker and everyone heard them bounce off the concrete. All eyes kept glancing toward the barred and reinforced door at the front of the structure. It was the only way out or in.

If the North Korean was going to make an escape, his only option was out through that door. When the raiders outside came, it would be in through that same door. Sin-Bok’s entire world had shrunk to a four-foot-by-three-foot piece of steel hung on reinforced storm hinges.

Across the room Naranjo cursed loudly and threw his sat phone to the ground. It burst apart on the hard-packed floor, plastic pieces spraying out like shrapnel. The other group of people trapped in the bunker cringed at his outburst.

“I can’t get a signal out!” Naranjo shouted. “They’re fucking blocking communications.”

“Who?” Sin-Bok demanded. It made a very real difference who they were. “Is it your government?”

Realizing immediately what Sin-Bok feared, Naranjo scowled and shook his head. “No,” he said. “All we’ve seen are norteamericanos, maybe Europeans. I do not think these are Colombian Jaguars,” he finished, referencing the Colombian military’s elite unit.

“Then the flash drive has to make it out,” Sin-Bok said.

Naranjo opened his hands and looked around in question.

Salvation didn’t appear to be within reach. Sin-Bok quickly looked around the bunker again. He saw a fourteen-year-old girl in oversize fatigues and holding a ridiculously outsize M-16. Her brown eyes were almost comically big.

FARC, like most Third World insurgencies, recruited heavily from younger members of their impoverished society. Sin-Bok, who had been raised and conditioned since birth to put nation before self, understood this. He also understood how abhorrent the concept of child soldiers were to the Western powers.

“You,” he barked. “Come here!”

The girl started when she realized he was pointing toward her. She cut her gaze to Naranjo, who, confused, nodded. As the girl began crossing the room, a burst of gunfire slammed into the bunker door.

“They’re coming!” Sin-Bok snapped. “Hurry! Now, someone give me a condom.”

Naranjo looked as if he’d been slapped. “This is hardly the time for—”

“Shut up, you fool,” Sin-Bok snarled. “The flash drive must get out. I need a condom.”

Despite being born to a heavily Catholic country, many of the FARC soldiers, heavily influenced by secular Marxist ideals, had a prophylactic on their person. Rubbers were as ubiquitous as cigarettes among soldiers.

Working quickly, Sin-Bok tore open the wrapping and pulled the lubricated sleeve free.

He dropped the flash drive inside the condom and quickly tied a knot in the end. He handed it back to the girl. She held it out in her hand as if it was a snake. She looked back at the North Korean.

Sin-Bok waved his hand at her. “Hurry, hurry.”

Shrugging, the girl leaned her M-16 against a table and began pulling at her belt buckle to loosen her pants.

“No, no, no!” Sin-Bok yelled. “Swallow it, you idiot!”

The girl made a face but quickly slid the material into her mouth and swallowed hard. She gagged once and coughed, then was done. Satisfied, Sin-Bok stepped up close and grabbed her by her thin arms.

Pulling her close, the North Korean locked eyes with the frightened girl. “Listen close,” he instructed. He spoke an address in Bogotá to the girl, made her repeat it. “Now get naked. Go to the corner and do not fight. If the Americans make it through and we lose, pretend you were kidnapped. Then, later, you get that flash drive to the address I just gave you.”

“Seven must prevail,” Naranjo muttered from over the Korean’s shoulder.

“Seven must prevail,” Sin-Bok agreed.

OUTSIDE THE BUNKER DOOR the Phoenix Force entry team prepared for the final assault.

Manning and Encizo formed anchor points on opposite sides of their skirmish line. Up on the hill Able Team provide a second level of security overwatch. The battlefield was spread out below them like a chessboard. Jack Grimaldi, from a standoff position, continued to use his missiles and machine gun to devastating effect along the periphery of the compound.

Calvin James let his main weapon hang loose from its strap as he manipulated an industrial caulking gun. Beside him Hawkins presented timing pencils with preset timers.

McCarter surveyed the iron door as James and Hawkins prepped the demolition charges, a grenade in one hand. “Quarter-inch internal hinges, likely with reinforcement points at the latch and corners,” he said.

James nodded. “I brought a big hammer just in case,” he said.

The foam shape charge squirted out of the caulking gun like icing from a chef’s pastry applicator. With expert dabs and straight lines the ex-SEAL wasted no time in positioning his charge at the most precise locations. Finished, he stepped back and tossed the caulker aside.

“‘That’ll do, Pig. That’ll do,’” he quoted.

Hawkins snorted as he quickly placed the timers and started the countdown. “Fire in the hole, people,” he warned.

The entrance into the bunker was a short set of steps leading four feet down into the ground with sandbag walls built up on the side. Moving quickly and under covering fire from the support units, they peeled back from the doorway.

The charges went off with a loud, flat bang, and black smoke rolled out. Immediately automatic weapons fire burned out of the opening from inside the bunker.

“Hawk!” McCarter ordered.

The lanky Texan rushed down the steps, slid into a corner of the doorway and produced an awkward-looking assault rifle from a sling carry on his torso.

The CornerShot Assault Pistol Rifle boasted a steel hinge that allowed the weapon to be folded into an L-shape and fired around corners. The version used by Hawkins now had a digital folding heads-up-display screen and handgun at the end of the weapon capable of firing 5.56 mm ammunition.

Coolly, Hawkins swung the weapon around the corner into the teeming confusion inside the bunker. A shape loomed up, filling the screen. Hawkins pulled his trigger three times and the shape went down.

“Do you have eyes on?” McCarter demanded.

“Negative,” Hawkins replied. He snapped the weapon back around in the other direction. “Hold on!” he said. “There! I have eyes on Target Pusan Kim chi. He’s at position fourteen-thirty.”

“Fourteen-thirty,” the team repeated out loud, using the twenty-four-hour indicator for two-thirty on a clock.

McCarter, grenade primed, chucked the little hand bomb in a slap-shot maneuver around the corner as Hawkins folded back out and switched out weapons.

There were curses in Spanish and a cry of terror, then the stun device went off with a brilliant flash and a deafening bang.

“Go! Go! Go!” McCarter barked.

Hawkins charged down the steps into the smoke, weapon up, visor in place. He stepped across the threshold and button-hooked to the left. Two steps behind him Calvin James rushed into the room, twisting to the right. McCarter tapped Rafael Encizo on the shoulder, then charged in after Hawkins and James.

Encizo rushed down the steps into the hellbox.

Behind them Manning held their direct six while the guns of Able Team provided overwatch support fire.

Already pockets of resistance on the compound had begun to fade. Vehicles burned, FARC corpses lay like trash on the ground and Grimaldi’s Blackhawk hovered over the scene, miniguns blazing in sporadic bursts.

Inside the bunker Hawkins rushed forward.

Disorganized and wounded FARC guerrillas stumbled past him. He shot two, skipped over their falling bodies and reached the huddled form of Sin-Bok. The North Korean operative looked up and Hawkins dropped a haymaker on his face two inches up from the point of the man’s chin.

The target dropped, and James rushed forward, spinning around to cover the rest of the room as Hawkins slapped plastic riot cuffs and a dark hood on the Korean. Out of the smoke and dark a screaming FARC officer appeared, a .45 ACP filling his hand.

The pistol roared, the muzzle-flash illuminating the gloomy bunker like lightning. Two heavy slugs slapped into the concrete above the Korean’s head, and James realized the man had been trying to silence the foreign agent. He shot the FARC officer twice, once low in the stomach and once through the face as he folded.

“Let’s go!” Hawkins grunted.

Across the room Encizo and McCarter were clearing the rest of the bunker with ruthless, mechanically murderous proficiency.

James helped haul the groggy Korean to his feet. He turned away from the man, hand on the pistol grip of his weapon. His eyes scanned the room as they began moving forward, looking for any last-second piece of intelligence or overlooked threat.

“Damn, hold on!” he shouted.

Hawkins turned, pushing the Korean down and bringing up his weapon. He jerked around, looking for the threat, but didn’t see anything moving. He looked down and saw what James was looking at.

The girl was in her underwear and huddled against the wall. A dead FARC soldier lay bleeding in front of her. She looked up at the masked and heavily armed commandos with stark fear.

“Hey, boss,” Hawkins called to McCarter.

“Who are you? How did you get here?” James asked the girl in Spanish.

“What?” McCarter demanded. He looked over. “Shit,” he said simply.

“My name is Maria,” the girl said. “I’m from the village of San Sebastian. I want to go home, please.”

“This is mission creep.” McCarter spit.

“We put her on the Blackhawk,” James said, “turn her over to our South American liaison. They contact a relief agency. No fuss, no muss. Just a chopper ride.”

McCarter hesitated, even though everyone there knew there was no way they were leaving a helpless teenage girl behind them.

“Fine,” the ex-SAS trooper said. “But she’s your baby till we hand her over to our Agency contact.”

“No problem,” James answered.

McCarter spoke into his throat mike. “Phoenix, we are leaving.”

THE COMPOUND WAS DOTTED with fires. Corpses, broken weapons, body parts and the cinder hulks of destroyed vehicles specked the ground.

Keeping their security level high, Phoenix Force approached a flat stretch of ground as Jack Grimaldi brought the Blackhawk in for a landing. From the opposite side of the clearing Able Team broke cover and began their approach to the helicopter.

As the teams crammed into the troop transport bay under the watchful minigun, Carl Lyons looked over to where the girl sat quietly. James’s black fatigue shirt was hanging off her.

“What the fuck?” Lyons demanded. “You can’t go anywhere without finding strays?”

James laughed from behind his balaclava. “That’s why I signed up, man, to meet new people and make friends.”

Lyons turned and looked at the carnage the Stony Man teams were leaving behind as the helicopter lifted off.

“Oh, man.” The ex-cop chuckled. “We made plenty of friends today.”

“Yeah,” McCarter agreed. “But we just don’t seem to play well with others.”

Kiev, Ukraine

KLEGG SIPPED HIS DRINK and watched the clubgoers through slitted eyes.

The vodka was expensive and ice-cold so it went down with little more bite than frigid water. The dance beat, a hypno-industrial blend of tribal-styled rhythms, was two years past hip in New York and three in Europe. Despite this the meat-packing plant turned trendy nightclub was crowded with young, inebriated and apparently sexually frenzied young people fueled with chemical cocktails and copious amounts of hard alcohol.

Next to him Svetlana scanned the crowd with the bored indifference of the nouveau riche. She was fashionably anorexic with thighs thinner than her knees and bare buds for breasts. She was draped in a Pierre Cardin silk number with all the ridiculously expensive space-age, unisex, avant-garde styling that implied. She let a hand drift to the flat plane of her stomach, her eyes as large as a character’s in a Japanese manga above the drawn, stark lines of her cheekbones.

Klegg had known her for three days and in that time he’d never seen her eat anything but the olive from her vodka martini. Her energy, both in bed and out, seem entirely fueled by Stolichnaya Gold vodka and cocaine. She performed the most depraved of sexual acrobatics with the same robotic expression and untouchable eyes she used now to survey the club.

Glassy-eyed women in heavy makeup and tight, revealing clothing made their way past them to the concrete dance floor. Stalking them like wolves, strung-out male Russian urbanites, or the occasional steroid monster, followed in close pursuit.

Svetlana nodded to innumerable numbers of the club crowd. Her true value lay not in her penchant for kinky sex but in her vast, tangled social connections.

The youngest daughter of an extremely powerful and corrupt Moscow oligarch, she was more courtesan than prostitute. Klegg had flown halfway around the world and paid her in Colombian emeralds to secure an important introduction.

Upon accepting his request and payment for her services as social purveyor, she seemed to have slept with him out of habitual reflex rather than any sense of obligation.

Klegg himself had gone along with it because while vapid, she was still beautiful and because he had promised himself, upon passing the New York bar exam, that he would sleep with a woman from every continent.

After that challenge he had further redefined his goal to include economic regions and geographical features. It had only cost him one marriage and a stubborn case of herpes to meet his goal.

Klegg always achieved his goals, no matter what the price.

Kiev, he decided, really wanted to be Moscow and Moscow, he knew, really wanted to be Los Angeles.

His eyes scanned the crowd in a slow sweep like a radar dish. The images came back to him in jumbles: two girls in a booth making out while a crowd of onlookers gathered around. Stoned women on the dance floor slinging chem-lights around on strings while their dresses crept up their anorexic thighs. A long, greasy-haired kid in a thousand-dollar jacket dealing Ecstasy in front of the restrooms under the watchful eye of two hired thugs with bodies by Dianabol and eyes like polished steel mirrors.

The place smelled like sweat and cigarettes and liquor and sex. The din of the DJ’s stereo system was enough to qualify as a sonic weapon. Klegg could literally feel the 2-4 backbeat of the bass shake him with tactile force as it pumped out of the massive speakers.

He wasn’t here to have a good time.

He spoke Russian, among four other languages, and he was young enough not to stand out too terribly in the club during the initial surveillance. His cover was simple and straightforward because it was, in fact, his profession. He was a procurement specialist for a private contractor specializing in large-corporation inventory.

He made deals for engines in Peru, he acquired stockpiles of diamonds in South Africa, he secured binary processors in India, he obtained cooling systems for French Mirage jets and sold them to African dictators.

All the while he built his networks of shady lawyers, street contacts, intelligence agents, criminal syndicates, ship captains and bush pilots. Today he was going to expand that network into the field of soldiers for hire, and Svetlana was going to help him.