Unified Action

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“None of your business.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She crack it?” Lyons demanded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER SIX

Kyrgyzstan

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The plot deepens,” Encizo muttered.

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

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

“Let’s do it,” James agreed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Feeling hinky,” he muttered.

“Big time,” James agreed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing happened.

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

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

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

“Is this our guy?” Encizo asked him.

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

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

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

“Low velocity, larger caliber.”

“Pistol?”

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

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

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

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

“Chinese?” James offered.

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

“Curioser and curioser,” James replied.

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

Dominican Republic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

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

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

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

“Bear?” Wethers asked over one bony shoulder.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Okay?”

“They’re brothers.”

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

“Weather?” Kurtzman asked.

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

“Crap,” Kurtzman swore.

“High-end jammers,” Wethers agreed.

Kyrgyzstan

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

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

In five minutes everything had gone to shit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What the hell is going on?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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