Extermination

The vigilante might have gone legitimate, Scalia mused, and picked up some allies. It was always a rumor, a conspiracy theory among the families, chatter about how the greatest scourge of their professional careers engaged in one bloody weeklong endgame that had crippled their infrastructure, then disappeared. Some had called it a monopoly-breaking strategy. Sometimes people using his old strategies of urban warfare came back for a visit, leaving wreckage in their wakes.

Scalia stepped into his office and saw that his multiline phone had a blinking message. He felt the blood begin to drain from his face as he could only think that it was someone in his own service telling him about a mystery visit. He hit the message playback, fumbling with the drawer of his desk to get to the pistol inside.

“Boss, it’s Dev at the desk. Some blond bastard by the name of Steele came by, telling me he was called in by you,” the message said. “I have the rest of security keeping an eye on him, but I didn’t want too much of a clusterfuck.”

Scalia sneered and hit the button for the main desk. “Dev?”

“He bluffed his way past me, pretending that he knew you,” came the answer from Lebron Devlin. “I got a look at his gear, and I’m scanning his cell for signals. All he has is two pistols, a big fuckin’ hog and a Glock or somethin’.”

Scalia sneered. “Get everybody to surround him and ready to move in. This guy is trouble!”

The door clicked and Scalia looked away from the phone for a brief moment. The doorway was filled with a broad, grim-looking bastard in a loose leather jacket, cold eyes glaring from under a brooding brow.

“No need to go all-out for me,” the guy said. “I’m just here to talk, not to fight. If I were here to cause shit, Dev wouldn’t be talking right now.”

Scalia swallowed. “So…let’s talk.”

The blond hulk in the doorway smiled, took a step in, and the door clicked in the ominous silence.

CARL LYONS COULD SEE the look of realization on Arno Scalia’s face when he opened the door. The Able Team leader knew that he wouldn’t have a lot of time before attracting the attention, and potentially the wrath, of the organization’s security. He was glad that he was able to continue his bluff, riding the wave of audacity and confusion among the mobsters all the way to the boss’s office.

“So let’s talk,” Scalia had told him, and Lyons closed the door behind him. There was a pleasing quality to the mobster’s uncomfortable silence that only added to his graveyard grin. Scalia wasn’t a small man, and the .45 auto he’d drawn from his desk drawer could easily have caused him some trouble, even with his body armor.

However, Lyons knew the value of intimidation and also realized the strength of adapting personality to the conversation. When he had been in the lobby, he was simply one of the guys, blowing smoke up people’s asses and getting accepted. Now, when he needed some questions answered, he had slipped into crazy-caveman mode. The grin he wore was pure cockiness, but the glint of determination in his eyes signaled a willingness to spill blood by the bucket.

Scalia picked up on that insanity, which, coupled with Lyons’s thick, muscular form, was a warning beacon.

“You…know that I have to maintain some secrecy for my organization…” Scalia said. “Professional…”

“Yeah, right, whatever,” Lyons cut him off. “If you know why I’m here and suspect who I learned my trade from, then you know that I’m not here to listen to you jack off at the mouth. I want answers or I’ll take blood.”

Scalia’s lips tightened into a bloodless line, his eyes flicking to the phone on his desk.

“Sure, hit your panic button, Arno. That’s not going to save your life,” Lyons said.

Scalia returned his gaze to Lyons’s face. “I’m sure I know why—”

“Then I don’t have to ask you any fucking questions, Arno,” Lyons snarled. “Don’t stall.”

Scalia nodded. “You’re wondering about some military stuff that went through here.”

Lyons nodded. His eyes burrowed into Scalia, who shifted uneasily in his seat and swallowing hard. Lyons knew that while there were ways to get information out of people—and he’d been forced to utilize torture at times for the sake of last-minute expedience—the best interrogators got their answers just by force of will. These types of interrogations were Lyons’s favorite. There was no blood, there was no moral quandary, and the answers weren’t the first lies screamed that made the pain stop. The Able Team commander was not a murderer or a sadist; he was a warrior and a seeker of justice.

“Well,” Scalia began, “we took the shipment and waited for them to bring their own trucks. We didn’t look inside, especially since the bosses made sure we didn’t fuck it up. They’re scared.”

“But you know who I come from, don’t you?” Lyons asked.

Scalia looked down, breaking eye contact. His bald dome was beaded with nervous sweat that rolled down his forehead in rivulets. “I don’t want to say his name.”

“You do know my friend Mack,” Lyons said.

Scalia visibly shuddered, his cheeks tingeing green as if he were fighting off a particularly violent bout of food poisoning. “Th…th…they said he was dead.”

“You think you can kill the devil made flesh, come to collect the souls of you damned petty thugs?” Lyons asked, his voice dropping to a deep, rumbly baritone, tapping every movie about exorcism he’d ever seen as a boy. “The living spirit of murder and terror does not die, no matter how much you shoot him or burn him.”

The acrid stench of urine suddenly filled the air as Scalia messed himself, tears joining the cascade of sweat droplets crawling down his face. “Oh, God…”

“If you had any pull with Him, I would never have found you,” Lyons said, standing, leaning forward with his knuckles on the desktop. He was bent close to Scalia’s face, his growl low and unholy. “Confession is your only salvation.”

Scalia flinched, one eye squinted shut, the other a mere sliver. “Please, Father in Heaven…”

“Now you find religion, after moving illegal automatic weapons and drugs across the country?” Lyons asked. “Your hypocrisy makes you an even more tasty treat.”

“Okay…okay…we sent out the crates to Idaho,” Scalia said. “We figured they were machine guns for the militias.” Lyons nodded.

“To make their own state. You know how crazy they are,” Scalia said.

“But they are honest in their hatred, if inaccurate as to the cause of their failures,” Lyons returned. “Idaho. Do you know where?”

“Just that the drivers let it drop that they were headed in that direction,” Scalia said. “They wanted to know the road conditions and such….”

“How do you know that they weren’t leaving a false lead?” Lyons asked, easing back down.

“Because I called the slip in, and an hour after that driver left, his corpse was found in a Dumpster three miles away,” Scalia answered. “These fuckers didn’t mess around.”

“A Dumpster. You and your people take care of the body?” Lyons asked.

“Not my department,” Scalia replied. “But his ass didn’t go to the morgue.”

“How long ago was this?” Lyons asked.

Scalia’s eyes widened.

“How. Long. Ago?” Lyons repeated with a growl for each word.

“Three days,” Scalia said. “So they should be in Idaho, even if they made rest stops, though I doubt it. There were multiple drivers for each rig.”

Lyons grimaced. “We’ll find them.”

“And what about me?” Scalia asked.

“You can make it easier for me to keep an eye on this operation, or the next,” Lyons said.

“Are you kidding me?” Scalia quizzed. “They know that I talked to you…”

Lyons picked up Scalia’s 1911 and let out a shrill, frightened scream, firing the entire magazine through the door. Once the slide locked open, he turned to Scalia. “This is going to hurt, but you’ll wake up.”

Scalia was frozen in wide-eyed horror as the big burly blond pulled the biggest revolver he’d ever seen from under his leather jacket. With a flick of the wrist and a sharp, searing flame across his forehead, the mobster’s fears vanished into the calming, accepting embrace of unconsciousness.

Lyons knew that he wasn’t going to have a lot of time before the security teams would be rushing toward the door. Just to make things more convincing for Scalia, he punched the unconscious man to raise bruises and welts on his face. A couple of shots to the side and the stomach, and he was done with that. Scalia would look like he’d been put through a wringer, and the sound of the beating would be audible through the doors. Lyons just had to make certain that he left witnesses alive.

That wouldn’t be too difficult for the Able Team leader.

The first two men through the door entered hard and hot, kicking through the weakened wood of Scalia’s office entrance, pistol-grip shotguns held at the hip and each blasting out a thunder-load of buckshot into the air. Obviously the two men must not have practiced much with 12-gauges without stocks as the recoil jerked the weapons in their grasps, but they’d been counting on the initial bellows of the weapons to cut down enemies in front of them, or the loud roars to act as a stun-shock grenade, overpressure hammering the ears of anyone who’d stayed out of the way.

Lyons had been standing to the side of the doorway, and he had been prepared enough to have a pair of electronic bud earplugs. They filtered potentially damaging sounds to manageable levels without compromising his ability to hear footsteps in the distance. The guard closest to Lyons looked over his shoulder to see the big blond ex-cop lunge at him. Lyons drove him face-first into Scalia’s desk with a heel strike to the back of his head.

The other gunner turned in reaction to his partner’s sudden crash, but Lyons was ready with a shotokan side kick that landed under the guard’s sternum with sufficient force to lift the man off his feet before he crashed against the bookshelf behind him. It took a moment for Lyons to be certain that these two could give a corroborating story to their superiors about the assault on Scalia.

Never one to pass up a free weapon or ammunition, Lyons scooped up a stockless shotgun from the floor. It was a stubby tool, and he readily recognized it as an Ithaca Model 37 Stakeout Shotgun, a tool he’d used before. It only had a thirteen-inch barrel, but that gave it a magazine tube with room enough for four rounds of 12-gauge buck. Lyons also noted that there was a sidesaddle that held six spare shells on the side of the receiver. Lyons took one shell and inserted it into the magazine, then grabbed the other weapon after slinging the first over his shoulder. Making certain that the other shotgun had been topped off, Lyons was ready for serious business. Eighteen rounds of 12-gauge would make busting out of the building much easier.

He picked up the stomp of feet in the distance and barreled out into the hall, the stubby shotgun easy to maneuver through the doorway. With a hard kick, he entered the room across the way, a storage room loaded with filing cabinets. He’d ducked in just in time to avoid a spray of pellets that chewed off the doorjamb. Lyons knew that his Kevlar would hold against their onslaught, but the enemy gunners probably had their own body armor. He popped around the jamb, sighted down the barrel of the Ithaca and emptied a charge into the legs of the lead gunman. The load of buckshot tore his thigh and knee to shreds, turning him from the point of the spear to a snarl in the flow of guards moving toward Lyons.

As he ducked back in, the hallway resounding with the booms of shotguns discharging unintentionally and bodies and metal bouncing on tile, Lyons reviewed the brief glimpse he’d taken of the security team. They wore bulky vests, obviously heavy enough to absorb the impact of a 12-gauge load to the chest. It wasn’t going to be a deadly blowout, leaving plenty to wonder what the hell had just hit them. Still, Lyons wanted these armed thugs to know that they were in the wrong line of business. One of their number was already maimed.

Lurching out into the open, he saw one of the mobster security gunners already up on one knee. Lyons triggered the Stakeout, its muzzle blast a mighty belch of flame and thunder. The guard whirled violently as his shoulder was smashed to a gory pulp of splintered bone and mutilated muscle. Lyons’s target had barely hit the floor when a second man rose from both hands, utilizing the strength of his legs to turn into a human missile aimed at Lyons’s midsection.

The ex-cop had played plenty of high school and college football in his days as a lineman. While he easily could have resisted the clumsy lunge, that would have tied him up too long to efficiently deal with the other two gunners who were recovering their wits and weaponry. Lyons sidestepped, bringing down his elbow between the tackle’s shoulder blades. Only the guard’s momentum had saved him from a severed spinal cord, but even so, he bounced off the tile floor face-first, teeth and blood flying everywhere from the messy impact. He wouldn’t be getting up soon.

One of the last two gunners swung his shotgun up to eye level. The Able Team commando dropped to the floor, barely a heartbeat ahead of a blast that would have destroyed his face and vaporized his brains. Lyons returned the nearly fatal favor, triggering his Stakeout between the man’s legs.

At a range of only a few feet, all nine pellets in a double O round of buckshot had little time to spread apart, so they struck almost as one, tearing and ripping through fabric and meat with equal ease. Unfortunately for the gunman, the pelvic girdle was made of tough, fracture resistant bone, which deflected the pellets through the man’s bladder, lower abdominal muscles and the network of arteries that fed his legs. Brilliant crimson erupted from the doomed gunner’s groin, horrific neural trauma making the dying man drop his weapon. He stumbled backward.

The last of the gunmen lurched to one side, avoiding his collapsing partner, but Lyons had racked the slide on his shotgun and blasted away again. The much more slender bones of this target’s forearm shattered as the wave of buckshot ripped through them. Some of the pellets deflected off the barrel of his weapon, but most of them continued on into the guard’s face, tearing furrows through cheeks and forehead. Slowed down by the man’s arm, they hadn’t proved fatal, but he was going to need significant reconstructive surgery for his shredded face.

Lyons got to his feet and headed for the stairwell that he had scouted before bursting into Scalia’s office. He’d had several minutes to stake out the building, planning his escape route and the response of the security team. That kind of foreknowledge had been key in getting him and his team out of the narcoterrorist-filled jungles of Colombia or neo-Nazi ambushes in southwestern box canyons. He made a beeline for the stairwell, entering it.

He heard the stomp of boots even as he paused to feed the Ithaca the last five rounds in its sidesaddle, racking a shell into the breech before topping off the magazine. Normally, shotguns were carried with empty chambers, but this was the middle of a combat situation, so running around without a fully loaded weapon was beyond foolhardy.

Weapon full and ready to roar, Lyons dropped to the midpoint of the flight of stairs between the second and third floors. His two-hundred-plus pounds of muscle and extra equipment came down on the landing like the hammer of an angry storm god, surprising the group of security guards who were coming up from below. That sudden start gave Lyons all the opportunity he needed to cut through the men, working the slide of the Ithaca as fast as he could pull the trigger.

The leader of the group, the black man he’d spoken to, was bowled backward, his body armor absorbing the first charge of buckshot, turning him into an avalanche of muscle and sinew that crashed down on the gunners behind him. The rest of Lyons’s 12-gauge thunder tracked higher under recoil, his brawny arms providing more than enough strength to resist the kick of the stubby weapon.

Faces and shoulders disappeared in clouds of bone-splinter-filled crimson mist, bodies tumbling out of Lyons’s way as he continued down toward the second story. Lebron Devlin croaked as Lyons passed him, one hand clawing empty air.

“You bastard,” Devlin gurgled.

Lyons dropped the empty Stakeout on Devlin’s chest in a show of dismissal. He had no time to chat. The door guard had suffered broken ribs from taking a burst at the range of only a few inches, so there was little way he could put up any more of a fight.

The way to the first floor was clear, though booms thundered from above as the gunners higher up opened fire in an attempt to catch up with the escaping Able Team commander. Lyons twisted and fired skyward to dissuade pursuit. There were screams as legs were peppered with .36-caliber pellets.

With a kick, he was in the lobby, stuffing new shells into the tube magazine of his remaining shotgun. He strode confidently toward the small security cage that Devlin had worked in. A single blast from the Ithaca opened the locked door, and Lyons was able to locate his Combat PDA lying in the middle of the desk. He checked to make certain that it hadn’t been opened.

Schwarz was brilliant yet paranoid. He’d set up the small multipurpose communicators to melt down if someone tried to access the electronics within. Since there was no burned puddle of smoldering desk, things were all right.

Lyons had no qualms about entering a den of heavily armed smugglers, but even he didn’t intend to anger Schwarz by leaving one of his prized creations behind in enemy hands.

He noticed that he’d gotten a message while he’d been dealing with Scalia.

Strike in Indiana. We’re wheels up in thirty without you, the text read.

Lyons opened a link to his partners as he dumped his empty shotgun, exiting the smugglers’ office. “Able One reporting in.”

“There you are,” Schwarz said. “I didn’t see one bit of the Chicago skyline disappear, so I thought you were taking a nap.”

Lyons knew that his friend’s levity was concealing concern for his safety. “Tell Mott to hold up until I get there. I’ve got trouble brewing in Idaho now.”

“At least four of the bombs landed in a little armpit of a town called Albion,” Schwarz told him. “We’re heading there to see what’s up.”

“Never heard of the place,” Lyons answered, sliding behind the wheel of his rental car.

“Never will again,” Schwarz returned. “Everyone in town was killed, including several sheriff’s deputies.”

Lyons glared at the offices. Now that he was back in his car, he had access to an M-4 with an underbarrel grenade launcher. If anyone dared to poke his face out the front door, he’d lay into the mobsters with high-explosive death.

Sadly, the smugglers were too smart to tempt fate. They’d hunkered down, knowing that to pursue Lyons would be suicide.

“Play now, pay later,” Lyons snarled as a grim promise, driving off to the airport to meet with the rest of his team.

CHAPTER FOUR

In his younger days, David McCarter, the current leader of Phoenix Force, had earned the reputation of a hard-driving badass. He always seemed to be in a constant state of pent-up, impulsive action, easily growing bored, even with training exercises. He’d lived on the edge, primed and ready for battle. Back then, waiting for the start of conflict was something that ate at the young warrior’s nerves.

These days, though, as commander of Phoenix Force, McCarter learned what had been missing. He’d lived his entire life seeking challenges that could match his phenomenal skills, taking to the cockpit of any new aircraft he could to master its maneuvers, testing out various martial arts to find their strengths in relation to others. He devoured books continually, starting out in military history but spreading out to political philosophy and analysis of current events. Far from a thug, he realized that the untamed fires within his gut were a strength that sought a task worthy of him.

Being the brains of Phoenix Force was that task, and the times when his impatience would get the better of him had disappeared as he applied his experience to plotting actions and reactions even before the first shot was fired.

So when the Syrians attacked, just as McCarter had anticipated, he was not only ready, but had also prepared Phoenix Force to deal with the sudden arrival. Experience had taught the Briton that there was little that could be done when a member of a country’s covert-operations community came to harm or capture. He remembered avenging the deaths of colleagues, and he recalled when a Phoenix ally, Karl Hahn, was kidnapped by a terrorist group and the team went rogue to bring him home alive. The Syrians had lost men to Bezoar, and even if Damascus had sent orders for the hit team’s comrades to pull back, anger and loss of friends were powerful spurs.

There was no way they were going to let this insult to their fellowship pass.

McCarter also knew that sometimes anger made men sloppy. From their approach to the front doors, ignoring even the obviously armed Hawkins strolling down the street, McCarter knew that they were focused on the job of bringing hell to Bezoar and his crew of fellow murderers. He keyed his hands-free radio to toss out the orders.

“Go time. T.J., even the odds should Bezoar’s people or the Syrians seem to be winning. Keep out of the way, though. You’re not packed for a proper dustup,” McCarter ordered. “Gary…”

“Eyes in the sky, backing T.J. and monitoring you,” Manning answered.

“Rafe, Cal, it’s on,” McCarter said. “T.J., remember, nothing gets past you to the public.”

“On it,” Hawkins answered.

Amid the chatter of automatic weapons, the men of Phoenix Force took flight.

THE SYRIANS HAD blown in, loaded for bear, especially if that bear wore tank armor and carried a grenade launcher, Hawkins mused as he found cover in a doorway, drawing the sleek Belgian P-90 machine pistol from under his jacket. Three SUVs screeched to a halt, windows open and assault rifles hammering at the windows of Bezoar’s Parisian safehouse. The twisting, narrow street in front of the house was clogged by the big vehicles’ presence. They opened fire on the windows of the storefront that Bezoar had set up as a diner so ram-shackle that even the prostitutes didn’t want a piece of it. The roar of big engines in the predawn had sent the women scrambling, their street instincts telling them that the trucks had either belonged to police or an organized hit crew.

Either way, they wanted nothing to do with that fight, disappearing between buildings or scurrying down the street past Hawkins. They studiously ignored him as the glass of the storefront diner disappeared in a solid wave of lead. Anyone who had been inside would have been shredded, and from what Hawkins had seen, there were a couple of men nursing cold coffee mugs as they cast anxious glares into the darkened street.

The Syrians weren’t holding back. The unmistakable thump of a 40 mm grenade launcher echoed down toward Hawkins’s doorway, its high-explosive message shaking the ground at his feet.

“Dave, the Syrians are going nuclear,” Hawkins said into his throat mike.

“Heard that,” McCarter replied. “Bide your time.”

Hawkins grimaced, hating the wait, but the Briton had given his orders, and he had pulled the team through countless confrontations.

The Syrians piled out of their vehicles, a dozen strong, as their trucks idled, drivers and shotgun riders waiting behind them to secure their getaway transportation. A quick glance told Hawkins that he was smart to have brought along a 50-round magazine full of armor-piercing ammunition. The SUVs were solidly built, and the way the lights of the skinny road reflected off their windshields let him know that they were armored. He reminded himself that Phoenix had wrung the compact machine pistols out, and their 5.8 mm rounds could punch through a titanium plate backed by twenty layers of Kevlar out to two hundred meters and go through 9 mm of steel plate at fifty. He was barely fifteen meters from the lead SUV, meaning that no matter how resistant the glass, he’d be able to put rounds into the interior without much effort.