Target Acquisition

“Fall in around me!” Saheed el-Jaga snarled.

“To the roof and perimeter!” Abu Hafiza said in turn.

Men were scrambling into positions and snatching up weapons.

THE LINE DIPPED under Manning’s weight as he rode the Flying Fox cable car down the Kevlar zip-line. He sailed down the six stories and applied the hand brake at the last possible moment. He pivoted his feet up and struck the roof of the building on the soles of his combat boots.

Because of the size of his primary weapon, the cut-down M-60E, he couldn’t roll with the impact and instead bled off his momentum by sliding across the roof like a batter stealing second. With the last of his forward energy the big Canadian sat up and took a knee, swinging his machine gun into position and clicking off the safety.

Behind him he heard the sound as Calvin James hit the roof and rolled across one shoulder to come up with SPAS-15 ready. Above them they heard the muffled snaps as Hawkins cut loose with the silenced Mk 11 from his overwatch position. Below them in the courtyard around the sprawling house they heard men scream as the 7.62 mm rounds struck them.

Covering the exposed roof, Manning turned in a wide arc as Rafael Encizo slid down to the roof, putting his feet down and his shoulder against the line to arrest his forward motion. The Cuban combat swimmer came off his Flying Fox and tore his Hawk MM-1 from where it rested against the front of his torso.

McCarter landed right behind Encizo and rushed across the roof, M-4/M-203 up and in his hand. Gunfire burst out of a window in a mosque across the road. Manning shifted and triggered a burst of harassment fire from the hip. His rounds arced out across the space and slammed into the building, cracking the wall and shattering the lattice of a window. Red tracer fire skipped off the roof and bounced deeper into the city.

Above the heads of Phoenix Force in their black rubber protective masks, T. J. Hawkins shifted the muzzle of his weapon on its bipod and engaged the sniper. He touched a dial on his scope and the shooter suddenly appeared in the crosshairs of the reticule on his optics.

The man had popped up again after Manning’s burst had tapered off and was attempting to bring a 4-power scope on top of an M-16 A2 to bear on the exposed Americans.

Hawkins found the trigger slack and took it up. He let his breath escape through his nose as he centered the crosshairs on the sniper’s eyes. For a brief strange second, it was as if the two men stared into each other’s eyes. The Iraqi pressed his face into the eyepiece on the assault rifle. The man shifted the barrel as he tried for a shot.

The silenced Mk 11 rocked back against Hawkins’s shoulder. The smoking 7.62 mm shell tumbled out of the ejection port and bounced across the tarpaper-and-gravel roof. In the image of his scope the Iraqi sniper’s left eye became a bloody cavity. The man’s head jerked and a bloody mist appeared behind him as he sagged and fell.

Autofire began hammering the side of the building below Hawkins’s position. He rolled over on his back, snatching up his sniper rifle. He scrambled up, staying low, and crawled through the doorway of the roof access stair. He intended to shift positions and engage from one of the windows overlooking the compound in the building’s top floor.

Below his position McCarter found what he was looking for. He pulled up short and shoved a stiffened forefinger downward, pointing at an enclosed glass skylight that served to open up and illuminate the breakfast area. The opening had appeared as a black rectangle on the images downloaded from the Farm’s Keyhole satellite, and from the first McCarter had seized on the architectural luxury as his means of ingress.

“We have control,” Manning barked, and from half a world away Barbara Price and the Farm’s cyberteam watched from the UAV’s cameras. “We have control,” McCarter repeated.

To create a distraction on the hard entry Gary Manning had prepared explosive charges. Being unable to precisely locate their target before the strike, nonlethal measures had been implemented. Working with Stony Man armorer John “Cowboy” Kissinger, the Canadian demolitions expert had prepped a series of flash-bang charges using stun grenades designed to incapacitate enemy combatants in airplane hangars, factories or warehouses. In addition to the massive SWAT noise-distraction device Manning and Kissinger had layered in several devices from ALS Technologies that contained additional payloads of CS gas.

McCarter slipped into his own SAS model protective mask, then gave Calvin James a thumbs-up signal. “Five, four, three, two, one.”

The ex-SEAL jogged forward and pointed the SPAS-15 at the skylight. The semiautomatic shotgun boomed and eight .38-caliber slugs smashed through the reinforced commercial-grade window.

“Execute, execute, execute!” McCarter ordered.

Instantly, Manning stepped up and threw his satchel charge into the hole. As it plunged through the opening, the entry team turned their backs from the breach, shielding their eyes and ears. Instantly the booming explosion came. Smoke poured out of the opening like the chimney of a volcano.

James spun and stepped up to the ledge before dropping through the hole. He struck the ground and rolled to his left out along the side of his body, absorbing the impact from the ten-foot fall. He came up, the SPAS-15 tracking for a target in the smoke and confusion.

A running body slammed into him, sending them both spinning. Ignoring the combat shotgun on its sling, James reached out with his left hand and tore the AKM from the figure’s grip, tossing it aside as he rolled to his feet. His Beretta appeared in his fist. He pulled the guy closer but didn’t recognize the stunned terrorist and put two 9 mm bullets through his slack-jawed face.

David McCarter dropped down through the breach into chaos.

He saw James drop a body and spin, his pistol up. Around him the whitish clouds of CS gas hung in patches but the interior space was large enough that the dispersal allowed line-of-sight identification.

The Briton was violently thrown into a momentary flashback to his experience in the assault on London’s Iranian embassy after Arab separatists had taken it hostage. He saw a coughing, blinded gunman in an Iraqi police uniform stumble by and shot him at point-blank range with the M-4.

The man was thrown down like a trip-hammered steer in a Chicago stockyard. McCarter went back down to a knee and twisted in a tight circle, muzzle tracking for targets. Behind him a third body dropped like a stone through the skylight breach.

Rafael Encizo landed flat-footed then dropped to a single knee, his fireplug frame absorbing the stress of the ten-foot fall. His MM-1 was secured, muzzle up, tightly against the body armor on his chest and his MP-7 machine pistol was gripped in two hands.

Through the lens of his protective mask Enzcio saw two AKM-wielding men in headdresses and robes stumble past. The Cuban lifted his weapon and pulled the trigger, firing on full automatic from arm’s length. He hosed the men ruthlessly, sending them spinning into each other like comedic actors in a British farce. He turned, saw an Iraqi policeman leveling a folding-stock AKM at him and somersaulted forward, firing as he came up. His rounds cracked the man’s sternum, struck him under the chin and cored out his skull. The corrupt Iraqi dropped to the ground, limbs loose and weapon tumbling.

Gary Manning dropped through the breach, caught himself on the lip of the skylight with his gloved hands and hung for a heartbeat before dropping down. He landed hard with his heavier body weight and went to both knees. He grunted at the impact on his kneepads and orientated himself to the other three Phoenix members, completing their defensive circle as he brought up the cut-down M-60E.

Without orders the team fell into their established enclosed-space clearing pattern. Manning came up and charged toward the nearest wall, clearing left along the perimeter of the room while James followed closely behind him, then turned right. Encizo tucked in behind Manning as he turned left, and McCarter, also charged with coordination, followed James.

Manning kicked a chair out of the way and raced down the left wall of the room. Weapons began firing in the space and he saw muzzle-flashes flare in the swirling CS gas. He passed a dead man hanging by chains from the wall. A close-range gunshot had cracked the bearded man’s skull and splashed his brains on the wall behind his head.

Manning suddenly saw a police officer standing with a pistol, three men with Kalashnikovs in a semicircle in front of him. The Canadian special forces veteran triggered the M-60E in a tight burst, and the 7.62 mm rounds tore the first police bodyguard away as he rushed forward. From behind him Encizo used the MP-7 to cut down the left flank bodyguard before the Iraqi police officer could bring his weapon around.

Manning took two steps forward and shoved the muzzle of his machine gun into the throat of the final bodyguard as Encizo swarmed around him. The Iraqi stumbled backward, at the blunt-tipped spearing movement, his hands dropping his weapon and flying to his throat. As he staggered back, Manning lifted a powerful leg and completed a hard front snap kick into the man’s chest, driving him farther backward and into the police officer.

Both men fell as Encizo reached forward and thrust the muzzle of his smoking-hot machine gun into the coughing and half-blinded Saheed el-Jaga’s face, pinning him to the floor. With his other hand Encizo broke the man’s wrist, sending his pistol sliding away.

Hot shell casings rained down on Encizo as Manning cracked open the bodyguard’s chest with a 5-round burst from the M-60. Blood splashed Saheed el-Jaga’s face as he grimaced in pain, and the stunned and terrified traitor squeezed his eyes tightly shut.

Manning halted his advance and swung the machine gun up to cover them as Encizo flipped the Iraqi over onto his stomach and used a white plastic riot cuff to bind his hands. Saheed el-Jaga screamed in pain as the shattered bones of his wrists were ground against their broken ends by the Phoenix commando’s rough treatment.

A block of light appeared in the gas-choked gloom. A knot of well-armed reinforcements surged through the open door from the outside. Manning shifted on a knee, swinging around the M-60. He saw one of the reinforcements fall, the side of his head vaporizing, then a second fell and Manning realized Hawkins had found his range even at this acute angle.

Manning pulled back on the trigger of his machine gun and the weapon went rock and roll in his grip. He scythed down the confused Iraqi terrorists, cutting into their ranks with his big 7.62 mm slugs. The men screamed and triggered their weapons into the ground as they were knocked backward. He let the recoil against his hand on the pistol grip push the muzzle up, and his rounds cut into the terrorists’ bodies like buzz saws.

“Phoenix, we have company,” Tokaido warned over the team’s earbuds. “Hellfire number two is away. Danger close.”

Calvin James spun, bringing up the SPAS-15.

The combat shotgun boomed like a cannon in his hands and steel shot scythed through the CS-tinged air to strike two AKM-wielding figures. The Iraqi terrorists were thrown backward and spun apart, arms flying in the air, weapons tossed aside by the force of the blasts.

One of them tripped over a wastepaper basket and went down hard. The second bounced off a wall and tumbled into a chair. James moved between them, double checking as he went. The one on the floor was leaking red by the gallon from a chewed-up throat and torn-open chest. The second was missing enough of his face that the ex-SWAT officer could see his brains exposed.

There was a burst of rifle fire and the SPAS-15 was knocked from James’s hands. Heavy slugs slammed into the ceramic chest plates of his Kevlar body armor. He staggered backward and grunted. His shoulder hit the wall and he went to one knee. Reflexively his hands flew to his Beretta. As he drew the handgun David McCarter lunged past, the M-4 carbine up and locked into his shoulder, the muzzle erupting in a star pattern blast.

He saw the figure wearing an expensive black silk thobe at the last moment and pulled his shot. The 5.56 mm rounds struck the man in his legs and swept him to the floor of the building. Bright patches of blood splashed in scarlet blossom on the figure’s thighs.

Behind them the front of the building exploded as Tokaido’s Hellfire struck.

CHAPTER SIX

McCarter was thrown to his knees. He grunted with the impact as something heavy and wet struck him between the shoulder blades, then he looked down and saw a severed arm lying on the floor. He felt the heat of the raging blaze behind him.

He struggled to his feet.

“Talk to me, people!” Akira Tokaido shouted over the line. “Talk to me!”

McCarter didn’t answer but lunged forward. Abu Hafiza was screaming from his shattered thighs but was pulling a Jordanian JAWS pistol from out of his robes. McCarter slashed out with his M-4. His bayonet caught the man across the forearm, slicing a long ugly gash. The Iranian screamed again as he dropped the pistol.

Still on all fours McCarter scrambled forward, wielding the M-4 in one fist. The blade of the wicked M9 bayonet jabbed into the soft flesh of Abu Hafiza’s throat and pushed the man backward.

“Freeze!” McCarter snarled in Arabic. “Move one fucking millimeter and I’ll put your brains on the wall!” He lashed out with the bayonet again, lancing the tip into the meat of the Iranian’s shoulder and opening a small wound.

“Speak to me, Phoenix!” Tokaido hollered again.

“Manning up,” Gary Manning answered. “That was very danger close, my man,” the Canadian special forces veteran said.

“Pescado, is good,” Encizo said. “I’m knee deep in tango guts, but that blast blew the front off the building.”

“Copy that,” Tokaido said. “They had two platoon-size elements as reinforcements at the door. Forty, fifty guys all bunched up at the entrance.”

“McCarter up,” McCarter said. “But Cal took a round and I have our boy.” He paused. “If we’re clear, I need help.”

Instantly there was a reaction from behind him and the massive frame of Gary Manning appeared by his side as Encizo scrambled over to pull security near the prone Calvin James.

Encizo leaned in close, his eyes hunting for enemy motion from behind the lenses of his protective mask. “Speak to me,” he demanded. “You okay, bro?”

James turned his head and opened his eyes. He opened his mouth to speak but no sound came out. Encizo, ears still ringing from the Hellfire blast, shook his head to clear his hearing.

“Speak, bro!” the Cuban demanded.

James lifted his head and muscles along his neck stood out with the effort. His lips formed the words under his protective mask and his eyes bulged with his effort under the lens but no sound came out. Finally there was a rush of air through the blunt nose filter.

“That hurt!” he wheezed. “Jesus, that hurt. I think I cracked my ribs.”

“Is he good?” McCarter demanded over one shoulder. His weapon’s muzzle never wavered from Abu Hafiza’s face. “Is he good?”

Beside the Briton, Manning fired his M-60E in a short 4-round burst. A crawling Iraqi terrorist shuddered under the impact of the 7.62 mm slugs and lay still. Encizo turned toward the Phoenix Force leader and shouted back.

“Yeah, he just had the wind knocked out of him. Maybe bruised ribs, maybe cracked—we don’t know, but he’s ambulatory.”

“He’s also right goddamn here,” James snapped, sitting up. “He doesn’t need you talking about him as if he were incapable of speech.”

“Good,” McCarter replied, his voice echoing weirdly under the mask. “I got our boy but he needs patching up before we yank him back to Wonderland.” McCarter switched to his throat mike. “Akira, how we look out there?”

“You got vehicles coming up the street. You’ll have more bad guys on site very shortly. I’m still sitting on Hellfire number three.”

“Fine. Hit ’em at the gate and cause a further choke-point but save number four for my direction.”

“Understood.”

McCarter pulled back as James moved forward, medic kit in hand. Abu Hafiza looked at the black man with real hatred as the ex-SEAL ripped open the thobe and began to treat the Iranian’s wounds.

“Give him morphine,” McCarter said as he rose. “We’re going to have to carry him anyway with those leg wounds. It’ll keep him docile.”

“I’ll be the one to play doctor here,” James said.

“Fine, you’re the medic—what do you want to do?”

“Probably going to give him a heavy dose of morphine to keep him docile.”

“Whatever you think is best.” McCarter shook his head.

Encizo spoke up. “What about the son of a bitch Saheed el-Jaga?”

McCarter looked over at the Cuban combat swimmer. “You guys tag and bag him?”

“Yep,” Manning interrupted as he rose. “We got him against the wall.” The big Canadian began to move down the length of the room toward the blazing hole in the building, checking each of the downed bodies as he did so.

“We aren’t prepped to carry two deadweights out of here,” McCarter pointed out.

“What’s the penalty for treason?” Manning asked.

“Firing squad,” Encizo said, an ugly smile splitting his face.

James looked up from bandaging the glowering Abu Hafiza. “Where will we find volunteers?”

McCarter turned, lifted his M-4 to his shoulder and pulled the trigger. Across the stretch of floor broken by the rapidly thinning clouds of CS gas the corrupt Iraqi police officer Saheed el-Jaga caught the 3-round burst in the side of the head.

Blood gushed like water from a broken hydrant and the blue-gray scrambled eggs of his brains splashed across the floor with bone white chips of skull in the soupy mess. McCarter lowered his smoking M-4.

The ex-SAS commando leaned down close to the wounded Iranian. “Abu Hafiza, you see I’m a serious bastard now?”

The al Qaeda commander paled under the scrutiny of the coldblooded killer. His eyes shifted away from the death mask McCarter’s face had become. Then he jerked and winced as James unceremoniously gave him an intramuscular shot of morphine.

The black man smiled with ghastly intensity at the captured Iranian terror master. “Don’t worry,” he said. “If we shoot you, it’ll only be in the gut.”

Manning and Encizo reached down and jerked the now stoned Abu Hafiza to his feet. McCarter spoke into his throat mike. “Akira, how we look?”

“Clock’s ticking. You got stubborn bad guys trying to dig their way through the burning barricade I made out of the first-wave vehicles. I’m still sitting on my last Hellfire.”

“Good copy,” McCarter said. “We’ll be rolling out the back door in about ten seconds. Why don’t you go ahead and blow me a hole out the back fence now?”

“One escape hatch coming up,” Tokaido replied.

“Phoenix,” McCarter said. “We are leaving.”

En route to Bolivia

IN THE BACK OF THE Cessna executive turbojet Able Team prepared for their mission briefing. Scrambled with their preassembled kits directed by Barbara Price, the Stony Man direct-action unit had been wheels up and flying south even before Hal Brognola had finished being fully briefed by the President.

Now, via sat link the big Fed and director of the Justice Department’s Sensitive Operations Group gave them a rundown on the situation.

“Currently FBI counterintelligence, counterterror and hostage-rescue units are scrambling to deal with a crisis. In Boliva, Juan Evo Morales holds power. A committed socialist and champion of the coca-leaf growers, he is a strong ally of the Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, and no friend of the United States.

“A plane filled with U.S. citizens has been taken hostage in the eastern lowlands where thick tracts of Amazonian rainforest carpet the topography. Officially the Morales government is helping the U.S. with the situation. Behind the scenes the government is restricting the movement, investigation and resource deployment of the FBI field team in order to maintain ‘sovereign integrity.’

“NSA has managed to discover that covertly, the Bolivian special forces, the Polivalente, are running a joint operation with Venezuela’s DISIP, or Directorate of Intelligence and Prevention Services. Faced with this obstruction we need you to run a simultaneous black operation to locate and free the kidnapped hostages independent from the official FBI efforts. You must infiltrate the country, acquire intelligence, perform tactical reconnaissance and execute the rescue.” Brognola paused. “Tactical specifics will be given to you once you arrive in Bolivia.”

Schwarz cocked an eyebrow and turned toward Blancanales. “Is it me or does the old man seem to be getting even more blasé as we pull off one impossible stunt after the other?”

Blancanales shrugged. “What am I going to do at my age? Start over and teach school?”

Lyons leaned forward and addressed Brognola through the sat link system. “No worries. We’re on it.”

La Paz, Bolivia

THE TAXI took Lyons away from the more affluent area and into the poorer neighborhoods, far from the Hyatt hotel, American consular branch office and the giant grocery store. Here Colombian refugees formed a strong minority, completely dominating some neighborhoods stacked with poorly constructed tenements and scattered with small shops.

This fact was punctuated to Lyons by his driver, named Jose, who spoke serviceable if broken English. At one point he noted to Lyons that they had entered an area exclusive to Colombians, a tent city from 1978 that had grown up into a labyrinth of winding, narrow streets separating concrete apartment buildings and one-room shops of every description.

After fifteen minutes of travel, the taxi entered another Colombian enclave and stopped in front of a four-story apartment building. Standing on the street, waiting for him, was Hermann Schwarz in street clothes. The American had allowed his beard to grow in under his thick mustache.

Lyons paid the driver and got out of the cab. Schwarz was holding open a steel door and he nodded and smiled in greeting.

“Que pasa, jefe?” he said, letting Lyons through the gate into a small courtyard, then directing him into the building itself. Lyons nodded a greeting and began to ask the Able Team commando a question, but Schwarz shook his head and whispered, “Upstairs.”

Lyons followed Schwarz as they climbed four stories up a narrow, bare concrete staircase. At each landing there was a large square window open to the outside. On the fourth floor the two men entered a stark, poorly lit hallway. At the end of the hall Lyons saw a woman in a traditional dark dress duck into a doorway to avoid them.

Obviously waiting for them, Rosario Blancanales, stubble-faced and dressed identically to Schwarz in street clothes, opened the door to their apartment. Lyons entered the room, shaking Blancanales’s hand once he was inside. Schwarz shut the door behind them and flipped a series of dead bolts closed.

Immediately upon entering the apartment, Lyons saw that there was a short, alcove-style hall to the left leading to an open closet and the bathroom. A U.S. Claymore antipersonnel mine was set up in the entranceway, angled at the door so the back blast would be funneled into the alcove. The ignition cord trailed down the hall, taped to the ground to avoid tripping anyone, and leading around a corner.

“What’s up?” Lyons asked. “Didn’t want anyone hearing us speak English?”

“I want to avoid it as much as possible.” Schwarz nodded. “Blancanales and I might fit in better than McCarter or Hawkins would, but nobody around here’s really fooled. English is pretty common here but it shouts ‘outsider’ in a way that makes me nervous in these Colombian ’hoods.”

“It’s like in my old neighborhood when I was growing up,” Rosario Blancanales added. “Everybody knows who belongs in the ’hood. Cops try to send in a plain-clothes and he was always spotted. The gangs know if a guy comes from three streets over, let alone from out of town. We look like the Bolivian version of lost tourists come to the big city as long as we don’t open our mouths.”