LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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