Extreme Arsenal

“And they had just the right size digger to punch a hole big enough from a naturally formed cave, or even an underground river to pop up in this mine,” Lyons finished. His brow furrowed. “It’s been nearly fifteen hours since the initial attack. We might have lost the trail.”

Something rumbled in the darkness.

“Or not…” Blancanales spoke up. He shouldered his rifle and looked through its scope. “Something big’s moving in.”

Lyons snicked the safety off on his Beowulf. “Pull back.”

An engine revved and roared, and floodlights snapped on. The Able Team leader pivoted and opened fire, .50-caliber, tungsten-cored slugs erupting from the muzzle of his rifle. The heavy slugs sparked violently on machinery. Through the lights, the three Stony Man commandos saw the whirling shapes of multiple drill heads spin wildly.

“Aw, hell,” Schwarz muttered as he cut loose with his own weapon. “We found the digger!”

“Fall back!” Lyons bellowed as the machine continued to close.

Blancanales triggered the M-203 attachment under his Beowulf. “Fire in the hole!”

A tunnel-shaking explosion, deadened by the sonic filters on the Wolf Ears, flared. The drilling machine was cast in stark relief. The moment that the high-explosive flashed, three rotating cones of multiple drills were visible, gnashing stone-chewing teeth flickering wickedly like the mouth of some hideous dragon.

The digger paused for a brief moment, shaken by the high-explosive grenade fired by Blancanales, then lurched forward again. Lyons shoved the Able Team veteran behind him and held down the trigger for an extended burst of heavy-caliber, armor-piercing slugs.

The spinning drill heads bounced slugs all over. The machine was all but indestructible as it bore down relentlessly on them.

Lyons dumped the empty magazine from his rifle, then looked back at Blancanales, who forced a fresh grenade into the breech of his launcher.

“I told you to move it!” Lyons growled.

A canister sailed over the two men, interrupting the Able Team commander.

“Heads down!” Schwarz called.

Lyons grunted as Blancanales kicked him out of the way and aimed at the ceiling above the digger.

The double-shock wave shook the whole mine and rolled over Lyons as if it were the treads of the deadly machine itself. Rock tried to flex, but shattered and crumbled. The pressure wave blew the Wolf Ears right off Lyons’s head, and he shook off the thunderbolt that cracked between his ears.

A clap on his shoulder brought him out of a temporary daze and he saw Blancanales shouting at him. The man’s lips moved, but nothing was coming through the ringing in his skull. He glanced over and saw the digger, its drill bits still whirring wildly. It had stopped, though, one light torn from its housing by the shearing force of the double explosion.

“—said are you okay, Ironman?” Blancanales asked.

“Yeah. What did you do?” Lyons asked.

“I dropped some of the roof on that thing, and Gadgets flipped some high explosive under the belly of the beast. Looks like he took care of at least one set of treads, and the collapsed rock pinned the rest down.”

Lyons blinked and saw Schwarz, highlighted by the remaining floodlight on the drill, his rifle aimed at the ground, looking around the sides of the machine when the thing lurched. Schwarz stepped back and fired a short burst into the drill head, but only succeeded in raising more sparks as heavy tungsten bit into solid steel.

“I don’t think it’s dead!” Lyons mocked as Blancanales helped haul him to his feet. They kept out of the range of the churning teeth. He looked around the front, then saw Schwarz shoulder his rifle and fire a single shot.

Smoke billowed and the trio of drill heads slowed.

“Spotted the motor and tried to take it out with a burst,” Schwarz explained. “Pull back some. I’m going to roll a grenade under the other motor.”

Lyons nodded, and he and Blancanales pulled back. The Able Team leader donned his Wolf Ears again and clamped them tight over his head. Schwarz raced back to them, and a new detonation rumbled in the confines of the tunnel. Blancanales and Schwarz spoke again, but it was muffled by the hearing protectors. Lyons tried the microphone switch and shook his head, removing the headset.

“That did it,” Schwarz replied. He looked at the Wolf Ears. “Problems?”

“Yeah,” Lyons answered.

“Let me look at it,” Schwarz told him. “Go check on the digger.”

Lyons nodded and followed Blancanales. The drill bits no longer moved, and Pol slid his frame between the digger’s chewing drill points and the ground. It was a little too close for the brawny ex-cop’s tastes, in case the machine managed one last surge of power. It could easily chew his friend to a pulp and Lyons wouldn’t have a chance to rescue him.

“Looks like we have room to get behind it,” Blancanales called. “The tunnel is pretty clear. A little rubble from the cave-in, but other than that…”

“Can you check to see if this thing’s fully down for the count?” Lyons asked. “I don’t want to have you stuck under this bastard with your shins chopped into ground beef.”

“Sure, hang on. Gadgets’s first grenade peeled open the bottom, and I can see a few engine parts,” Blancanales explained. He clicked on a pocket-size flashlight, then drew an Emerson folding knife. The sturdy blade sliced through cables, though the Able Team commando hissed as a slight jolt burned his fingers.

“You okay?” Lyons asked.

“Yeah. I cut through the main battery cables, and a little bit of the charge came up the blade. I wasn’t in good contact with the metal, though, so nothing more than a small burn,” Blancanales replied. “Taking care of the generator cables now, too.”

The floodlight cut out, and Lyons snapped on his pocket light. Schwarz tapped him on the shoulder and he accepted his Wolf Ears back. “What was wrong?”

“The shock wave knocked the battery wires loose. I stripped the insulation, hand wound it back together again, and taped it up. It won’t be perfect,” Schwarz said, “but you can hear, and the protectors will keep your eardrums safe. I’ll solder it into prime shape when we get back to base.”

“Good,” Lyons answered. “All right. Tie some rope around your rifle and pack. Pol’s going to haul our stuff through so we can get past this hunk of junk.”

“You think we might find something at the other end,” Schwarz replied.

“Yeah,” Lyons answered.

Schwarz looked at the machine, then frowned. “Hang on.”

He reached into his pack and pulled out a meter. “Pol! Shut off your comm for a minute! You too, Carl.”

Lyons nodded and did as his partner said.

“I’m picking up some readings,” Schwarz said. “A carrier wave.”

“But Pol killed the power,” Lyons replied.

Schwarz backed up and continued to look at his field meter. “It’s got its ears live for something. Wait…starting to pick up a signal the closer to the entrance I get. Pol?”

“I’m checking,” Blancanales called back. “Yeah! I feel this thing packed with plastic explosive.”

“Let me get in there,” Schwarz ordered. He pulled out another device and handed it to Lyons. “This is a jammer. Stand right where I was, and keep this thing on until I tell you to turn it off. Someone’s transmitting a detonation code to some explosives in the machine.”

“Enough to bring down the tunnel and take out a search party,” Lyons mused.

“You catch on fast,” Schwarz replied. Blancanales slid out from under the digger and Schwarz slipped underneath after clamping wire cutter handles in his teeth.

Blancanales crouched and added his light to Schwarz’s efforts under the machine. Lyons, no expert at demolitions disposal, stood with the jammer, sullen and silent. He didn’t like standing by helplessly, but he knew that his lack of experience with disarming explosives would only be a hindrance. Gadgets and the Politician were weaned on C-4 from their A-Team experience. If anyone could handle the booby-trapped juggernaut, it was his partners.

Lyons took a deep breath and waited for the deadly digger to be tamed.

ROSARIO BLANCANALES accepted the central processor from Hermann Schwarz.

“Save that. Bear and the others are going to have a field day working on its programming,” Schwarz told his old friend.

Blancanales nodded. “How did this thing move without radio controls?”

“The processor. It must be an artificial intelligence unit. Fairly basic. We set off the digger’s motion detectors as soon as we got too close,” Schwarz answered. Something snapped in the hollowed gut of the machine. “Damn. We woke it up. It’s got infrared sensors.”

Blancanales shook his head. “As soon as it got the detonation signal, it would have dropped the whole mountain onto us.”

“Or whoever went in. I’m thinking that they expected a platoon of soldiers, sweeping the darkness with IR to keep from being ‘seen,’” Schwarz replied. “It would have been like waking up Ironman with a floodlight in the face.”

Schwarz shimmied out from under the machine with a handful of radio components. “The detonators.”

“Look like standard radio units,” Blancanales replied.

“They are, but we can trace them. I’ll pull out the C-4, and then we’ll get the Rangers to pull out the digger,” Schwarz told him. “We’re going overland.”

Blancanales smiled. “The transmitter for the detonation signal would likely be manned.”

Schwarz nodded. “Beats a tunnel fight, especially if the drones rolled through an underground river. We don’t have scuba gear with us.”

“Good thinking,” Blancanales congratulated. “I’m sure Carl would like the breathing room too.”

Schwarz took out the squashed blocks of explosives and set them apart from the detonators. “Scorched earth, and a bunch more dead soldiers. The bastard behind these robots is starting to piss me off.”

Blancanales knew that the electronics genius was a mellow, slow-to-anger man. It stemmed from his Southern California upbringing, and the endless patience it took to work with ever-shrinking electronic components. The fact that he mentioned being upset meant that Schwarz’s blood had to have been boiling. Though he was part of the Stony Man Farm operation, he was still a veteran of the United States Army, and the death of brother soldiers always struck him hard. And unlike Carl Lyons, who mastered his berserker’s temper long ago, Schwarz got very cold when he got angry.

“We’ll take care of this,” Blancanales told him. “That’s our job. Revenge for the good guys…semiofficial style.”

“Prosecution to the max,” Lyons added. He picked up the C-4 to take it to the Rangers at the entrance. “I heard you two talking. We’re going overland?”

Schwarz nodded. His lips were drawn tight, trying to control his emotions.

“I’ll see if we can get a pilot,” Lyons replied. “Gadgets…”

Schwarz glanced up.

“They’re dead. They just don’t know it,” Lyons reassured.

Schwarz nodded tightly, as if the muscles in his neck were coiled to the breaking point. “I gotcha, big guy. Prosecution to the max.”

THE CANYON WAS too tight to land a UH-60, but a Hughs 500D “Little Bird” could set down nicely. The pilot was a clean-cut kid named Lieutenant Tim Sarlets.

“You boys call for a ride?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Schwarz replied. He climbed into the shotgun seat. He had one of his radio monitors in his lap, and looked at the Army pilot. “We’re going to be doing a little circling, triangulating a radio signal. Think you can do that?”

“Sure thing,” Sarlets answered. “Any other requests?”

“Keep us low,” Lyons told him. “We don’t want whoever we’re triangulating to spot us coming.”

Sarlets gave the big, blond ex-cop a short salute. “Roger that. I kind of figured you didn’t want to be seen.”

“I like this guy. Can we keep him around?” Blancanales asked.

“We’ll have to ask the boss,” Lyons responded.

Loaded up, the men of Able Team strapped in and the Little Bird rocketed skyward.

CARL LYONS PERCHED in the open side-door of the helicopter. In the darkness below, somewhere, a radio transmitter broadcast a signal that was intended to kill dozens of American soldiers on their home soil. On top of a massacre by armored juggernauts, the tragedy would have been compounded as more brave men died and the trail to the murderous masterminds would have been closed off by a collapsed mountain.

His knuckles flexed white around the grip of his Beowulf M-4. He’d replaced the magazine of tungsten-cored antimatériel rounds with a load of 350-grain jacketed hollowpoint bullets. Even against a living opponent who wore body armor, they’d shatter bones and mangle muscle behind Kevlar. Through the night-vision goggles attached to the helicopter helmet, the terrain beneath him was a weird, alien world of green hazy stone and deep shadows. He spotted movement and shouldered the Beowulf, but held his fire as a goat trotted out of a dark recess. Lyons lowered the rifle and shook his head.

“Anything yet?” he asked, impatience gnawing at his core.

Schwarz looked up from his map. He marked off another zone where the radio signal started to fade. “One more sweep, Ironman.”

“Good.” Lyons grunted. He double-checked the 40 mm high explosive round in the M-203 launcher stored under the barrel. Just because it was unlikely that they would run into the deadly drones that swept down on Yuma didn’t mean he didn’t want to have something that could devastate the slaughtering robots.

Schwarz’s murmurings, readings of the field monitor as he registered signal strength, were a low drone, a constant reminder that this was slow, tedious work. Lyons strained his ears, listening for the readings. He picked up Gadgets’s mutters of a lower signal strength and tensed even before the electronics genius made his announcement.

“That’s the box,” Lyons stated. He pointed toward a ripple of shadows and outcroppings. “Sarlets, put us down. We’re on foot from here.”

“I’ve got no clean spots to land. This is rough terrain,” the pilot answered.

“That’s good news,” Blancanales replied. “They couldn’t bring heavy antiaircraft along.”

“How about a crane helicopter?” Schwarz asked.

Lyons shook his head. “This place is too close to Yuma to pull that kind of—”

“The drones were invisible to radar,” Gadgets reminded him.

The Able Team leader’s jaw set firmly as he scanned the shadowy terrain ahead. “If they had stealth robot tanks, then they could build a stealth helicopter.”

A red light buzzed on the control console. “We’re hot! Target radar lock!” the pilot announced as he wrenched the helicopter hard.

Strapped in, Lyons felt jerked like a puppy on a leash. Out of the darkness, he saw a flaming halo growing in intensity and following the aircraft’s movements as the chopper thrashed.

He knew exactly what the flaming halo was—the rocket exhaust of an antiaircraft missile, the lethal shaft of its warhead forming the black void in the center of a hellfire ring.

Death shrieked at the men of Able Team on a jet of flame.

CHAPTER FOUR

Virginia

T.J. Hawkins sighed and slipped his Glock 26 into its hip holster. A second, identical tiny Glock was holstered at his ankle, and two 12-round magazines were clipped to his belt. He looked over to Calvin James as the man checked the loads on his .45-caliber Colt Commander and his backup short-barreled Colt Python.

“Jet Aer G-96 in an ankle sheath,” James told Hawkins.

“We’re going to CIA Headquarters. They’re just going to try to take our weapons away anyhow,” Hawkins replied. “Why do we have to run this drill every time we go out armed?”

Gary Manning and Rafael Encizo both shook their heads as they made sure of their weapon loads.

James, a tall, black man, held up his hand to the others. “T.J. hasn’t done as much legwork as we have, guys. Just because we’ve had some pretty soft travels for the past few years with him on military flights and not a lot of street-level investigation…”

Manning, a brawny Canadian, nodded. “I know. You were dropped in without being told how cold the water was with us. Since the majority of our activities lately have been paramilitary operations, T.J. hasn’t been given much exposure to the classic Stony Man Tourist Luck.”

“Stony Man Tourist Luck?” Hawkins asked.

Encizo, a handsome Cuban, grinned widely. “Whatever can come out of the woodwork will come out of the woodwork.”

“Terrorists at the airport,” James began.

“Thuggee assassins with strangling scarves,” Manning added.

“Don’t forget wolves,” Encizo admonished Manning. “Of all the times to have been without my PPK…”

“And ninjas,” James stated.

“Like cucarachas.” Encizo spit.

“This is CIA Headquarters, guys. Not downtown Beirut,” Hawkins explained. “Sometimes I think McCarter’s feeding you paranoid pills.”

“We tried,” James said with a sigh.

Manning slipped a magazine full of .357 Magnum slugs into the grip of his Desert Eagle and stuffed it in his shoulder holster. “No knives. But I have an Impact Kerambit wrench in my right front pocket.”

The others nodded.

“Come on,” Manning ordered. “T.J., you drive.”

Hawkins saluted the Canadian with an index finger touch to his brow. “Yes, sir.”

AGENT SAM GUTHRIE looked at his desk clock and saw that his noon appointment with the four Justice Department agents was only minutes away. He closed the top button of his shirt, readjusted his tie and made sure his shirt was tucked into his suit pants. Being a tall, slim man, it was hard to find clothes that fit him so that he matched the image of a neat, suave spy. At least the short bristle of his graying blond hair was hard to mess. He turned off his computer and stepped out of his office.

“Want anything from the commissary on my way back, Xian?” Guthrie asked his secretary.

Xian, a pretty Vietnamese-American woman, gave him a warm smile. “No thanks. My roommate Dawn packed some quesadillas for me and I picked up some pop on the way in.”

“All right. I’ll catch you later,” Guthrie said, and left for the meeting, which was being held outside in a courtyard. The small park was ringed with white-noise generators concealed under bushes to prevent eavesdropping. It was also in sight of several low-profile guard emplacements, with Marine sharpshooters on duty. It may have seemed paranoid, but Guthrie knew from recent history that even Langley wasn’t immune to attack.

The four “Justice Department” agents looked like a motley crew to Guthrie—a tall, slender black man, a barrel-chested Caucasian, a stocky, swarthy Hispanic, and a lean, but average-looking Caucasian.

“I’m Roy. That’s Rey, Farrow and Presley,” Manning stated. “Hal Brognola arranged this interview.”

“Right. Something about an old acquaintance of mine,” Guthrie replied. “It wouldn’t be Roberto DaCosta, would it?”

Manning nodded. “What have you heard?”

“That he was murdered last night,” Guthrie replied. “I used to work with him down in El Salvador.”

“Doing what?” Encizo asked as Guthrie directed them to a granite table with matching semi-circular benches.

“We were investigating ORDEN and the ESA, the governing body of El Salvador and their pet killers, back in the eighties,” Guthrie replied. “Roberto was an asset within the organization, and he kept us up to date on ORDEN’s less than legal operations.”

“Death squads,” James challenged.

“Among other things,” Guthrie responded. “Even back then, we weren’t too excited to be associated with professional murderers. Once the Sandinistas murdered an American missionary in Nicaragua, and it appeared as a full-page spread in Newsweek, we became a lot more gun shy about who we worked with.”

Guthrie shook his head at the thought. “Roberto wanted out desperately, and I arranged for his relocation to London after ORDEN collapsed. Even though someone went to town exterminating the death squads that made up the ESA, it really wasn’t safe for him in-country anymore.”

Encizo nodded at the answer. He remembered Able Team’s wars with Fascist International, the primary supplier of right-wing death squads to Central and South America. Though he’d only been involved in one operation against the Reich of the Americas, he kept up with after-action reports and knew that when Able put Fascist International in its collective grave, the world became a better place to live. He ruminated for a moment on how much of a link there might be between a revived FI and the assassination of DaCosta.

“Did DaCosta keep close tabs on things back home?” Hawkins inquired.

Guthrie shrugged. “I tried to limit my contact with him. I didn’t want to compromise his new location.”

“You still refer to him as Roberto, though,” James stated. “He was more than just an asset.”

Guthrie frowned. “You picked up on that.”

“We’ve been around a few times,” Manning said. “What did you hear?”

“His nephew is on the run from something,” Guthrie replied.

“What happened?” Hawkins asked.

Guthrie shook his head. “I don’t know. That much didn’t get back to me, but I started trying to find him through my own resources…”

The throb of a helicopter cut through the air and caught the attention of the assembled men.

“Classic Stony Man Tourist Luck,” Hawkins muttered loud enough for James to hear over the approaching aircraft before the hiss of rockets split the air. Rooftop targets spit up geysers of flame, and Hawkins realized that the helicopter had just destroyed the heavy antiaircraft emplacements nestled atop the office buildings.

The ex-Ranger would have laughed if he hadn’t seen the weapons pods bristling like stubby wings on the sides of the helicopter. Instead, he dived across the marble table and threw Guthrie to the ground.

From the towers, Marine marksmen opened fire, but their rifle bullets only sparked ineffectually off the hull of the sleek gunship overhead.

A line of machine-gun fire chopped across the courtyard and a .50-caliber slug smashed a crater in the center of the marble table that Phoenix Force had been sitting at.

Manning dumped the magazine out of the butt of his Desert Eagle and stuffed in a clip of 180-grain, keg-shaped hunting loads. It wouldn’t be much more effective than the rifles the Marines had in the towers, but the combat rounds he had loaded previously would flatten like spit balls against an armored aircraft. Encizo unleathered his Heckler & Koch USP and pumped out a half dozen 9 mm Parabellum rounds before he ducked behind his heavy stone bench.

A rocket lanced from the wing pod and blew a Marine sentry in his perch to oblivion. Another two helicopters popped out over the main computer center, but unlike the slender-tailed, bulb-headed dragonfly that swept death and destruction over the Langley compound, these were ugly, reptilian sharks, disgorging rappelling lines and black, armor-clad killers.

“Look familiar?” James asked Guthrie.

“Nope,” the CIA agent replied as they got to their feet. James pushed Guthrie toward the shelter of another marble table as the deadly bug-shaped gunship pivoted and spotted them.

Manning fired two shots from his Desert Eagle, aiming the accurate weapon at the barrel-like rocket pod hanging off the side of the helicopter. The 180-grain keg-shaped slugs hit the drum-size target, but one round sparked wildly off the rocket launcher and ricocheted into the main body of the gunship. The second bullet punched through the thin, precut sheet-metal cover of the artillery rocket pod and glanced off the top of the tube. A fearsome jet of flame erupted from the front of the pod as the explosive dart was detonated by a .357 Magnum penetrator. The gunship rocked, but the pod was well-designed, containing and funneling the explosion into a thrust of superheated gas and shrapnel that peppered the windows of a building.

Explosive bolts fired and the heavy, drumlike canister tumbled off the stub-wing and sailed toward the ground. Hawkins had taken cover behind a tree, and was drilling 9 mm slugs at the bottom of the helicopter. His rounds had little effect, and he leaped wildly as the rocket pod smashed through the branches of the tree and cracked the concrete where he’d been crouched instants before.