LITMIR.BIZ

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      “You don’t know how bad it is,” the injured man urged. “This is worse than anything your side could imagine. Even we didn’t want it to exist.”

      “Exist?” Encizo asked.

      “When Bezoar showed his test, it was too terrible,” the one-eyed commando continued. “It’s a deadly enzyme…some kind of infectious protein.”

      “We figured as much,” Encizo returned. He didn’t want to betray his knowledge of one of Bezoar’s prior experiments, just in case the Syrians had a long enough memory to remember the destruction of a project that would otherwise have created a harvest hell throughout the Mediterranean.

      “He improved on it,” the Syrian told him. “But we missed.”

      “So you went after him again,” Encizo answered. He kept his attention only peripherally on the wounded man; his main job was to provide security for the back door.

      “No, we missed now!” the Syrian hissed. “He’s gone.”

      Encizo looked down at the wounded man.

      “This was a trap, and both of our teams walked right into it,” the injured man croaked weakly.

      Encizo felt his stomach twist at the news. “David, can you read me?”

      No answer over the radio, nothing but a blanket of static that knocked out the radio network he was plugged into.

      “David!” Encizo bellowed, hoping that his old friend could hear him.

      Gunfire rose to a crescendo once more in a far part of the building.

      DAVID MCCARTER GRIMACED as he realized that the tactical network that tied him to the rest of the team had gone silent. He waved to Calvin James, and the former SEAL nodded, acknowledging that his radio was out of commission, as well.

      “We’re in for a rough one,” McCarter muttered as the gunfire suddenly died out. “Or maybe not…”

      “One side’s run out of targets,” James commented. “We’re never lucky enough for both sides to finish each other off.”

      “There’s always a first time,” McCarter mused.

      “Yeah, right. I don’t see you running out willy-nilly,” James returned.

      The Phoenix leader nodded, but he still took the lead as he moved toward the stairs. The old apartment building was pre-elevator technology, so its center was a spiral staircase decorated with black wrought iron that twisted from the ground to the upper floors. McCarter’s ears were peeled for the sound of movement above, and he checked the steps. They were made of stone, so they wouldn’t bend and creak like wooden slat stairs, meaning that they simply had to keep their footsteps soft and careful.

      He moved up with catlike grace, James following several steps behind, preventing the pair from bunching up to be caught in the same burst or pattern of buckshot. McCarter, in the lead, knew he’d get most of the enemy attention, but despite his earlier assessment of how he’d matured in terms of no longer being impatient and addicted to action, he still was a man who led from the front, taking even more risks than those he assigned his own men. He had no illusions that he was bulletproof or immortal, but he knew his skills, equipment and reflexes. McCarter wasn’t the kind of man to boast, yet he knew his odds of surviving a close combat situation were among the best of anyone on the planet.

      Calvin James hung back for another reason: he’d supplemented his P-90 subgun with a sawed-off shotgun with a dull orange stock. The coloration wasn’t a matter of fashion, but rather a means of telling this particular weapon from a live, fully-lethal 12-gauge. The orange-stocked weapon had a tube magazine, and its threaded sling was loaded with less-lethal munitions, specifically designed for the purpose of rendering opponents incapable of fighting while still leaving them available for subsequent questioning. Less lethal was not a guarantee, and if James had to kill in his defense, he’d be able to end a foe’s existence with a direct hit to the face. Still, the majority of the loads were high-intensity neoprene slugs, flexible enough to yield when they struck flesh without penetration, but possessing all the horsepower of a regular slug. James had taken hits to the chest with one as part of his familiarization with the round’s effects, and even through body armor, his chest was blackened with bruises.

      Right now, however, the first three rounds were “ferrets,” or compact capsicum suspension dispersal shells that could punch through a windshield or a door and vomit out several dozen cubic feet of tear gas. Capsicum was another effective tool in taking foes off guard, denying them their sight and smell, as well as limiting their ability to speak as their mucus membranes inflamed at the touch of the raw, powerful pepper extract. Bezoar needed to be taken down, and it would be beneficial to Stony Man to figure out who had spirited the mad scientist out of Syria and into Europe.

      “Let ’em have it,” McCarter said in a stage whisper to James, and the Phoenix Force medic brought up the stubby shotgun, working the slide and trigger of the weapon as fast as he could, spearing the trio of ferret rounds toward the fourth and top floor of the building. Thick, cottony white smoke roiled from their points of impact, immediately followed by a fit of coughing and wheezing.

      A figure stumbled into the open, his head wrapped in dark cloth, a machine pistol locked in both of his fists. McCarter reacted to the man’s sudden appearance with well-honed, lightning-fast reflexes. A snarl of 5.8 mm rounds tore into the gunman just before the tear-gas-resistant foe could pull the trigger. While the FN P-90 didn’t throw fat or heavy slugs, its lightweight projectiles moved at 850 meters per second and carried 540 joules per bullet. When McCarter opened up at 800 rounds per minute, ripping five shots into the gunman, ribs shattered and flesh parted as the high-velocity projectiles created havoc. With his lungs and aorta reduced to ribbons of slashed tissue, the only thing that the would-be killer was able to do was to tumble headfirst over the railing.

      McCarter hoped that the hardman was instantly dead; otherwise the crushing impacts against the rails of the spiral staircase would have been additionally agonizing, limbs folded with ugly crunches as his mass and velocity vectors proved far too much for his skeleton to withstand. Forty feet down, Bezoar’s hired gun stopped violently, his corpse accordioning against the floor, spine compressing, discs sliding off to the side from each other in their effort to accept gravity’s loving embrace.

      “It’s not the fall—it’s the sudden stop,” McCarter mused to himself.

      Other defenders had donned some manner of clothing to shield their nostrils and eyes from the brutal effects of the tear gas, but none had been so quick and efficient as to be able to charge out with their guns ready to blaze like their recently departed comrade.

      As he took the steps three at a time, McCarter bounded to finish this encounter with the enemy shooters before the Parisian gendarmes arrived with a few heavily armed assault teams. While Phoenix Force proved that it was able to fight its way out of some of the most hostile environments in the world, getting into a direct conflict with lawmen only doing their job was something that the Stony Man warriors wanted to avoid at all costs. Shooting a soldier on the same side was a moral choice that each had taken. While that moral choice was made flexible in dealing with corrupt and crooked lawmen or troops, the French counterterrorism police were allies in the same cause.

      With that in mind, McCarter let the P-90 drop to the end of its sling, withdrawing a collapsible ASP baton. He flicked his wrist, and the high-tensile steel tubes telescoped to their full length with an ominous snap. The sound caught the attention of one of the masked thugs, and he turned, drawing up his Steyr TMP machine pistol to deal with the sudden attack. McCarter batted aside the enemy gunman’s barrel with one swipe of the locked baton, using the rebound off the gun’s polymer frame to guide his next strike, a jaw-shattering stroke that whipped the cloth from his face.

      McCarter could see that the enemy had East Asian features in the brief flutter of freed-up cloth, but he kicked the stunned or unconscious foe out of the way, whipping the point of the ASP down on the juncture between another gunman’s neck and shoulder. Nerves overloaded under the assault, bringing

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