LITMIR.BIZ

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T.J.?” McCarter asked.

      “No one left on this level at the front,” Hawkins reported.

      “No one at the rear,” James said, unseen somewhere on the other side of the building. “We took out one gunner. All’s quiet.”

      “All right,” McCarter said. “Search the bodies. See if you can find anything useful. I’ll make the rounds up here and then join you on the ground. Gary?”

      “On my way back to the truck to check Gopalan,” the big Canadian’s voice came back.

      “Good,” McCarter said. “Not such a bad plan, now, was it?”

      Manning grumbled something over the link. McCarter resisted the urge to laugh.

      He checked each man in turn. The shooters carried guns and some ammunition, but nothing else—no identification, no clues, and no other personal effects. McCarter took a picture of each corpse with the camera built into his secure wireless phone. The other Phoenix Force members would be doing the same, he knew. The pictures would be sent to the Farm to see if an identification, and hence any records, could be pulled from across the vast computer networks to which Stony Man had access.

      He was toeing over the last of the bodies when the man lying on the rusty catwalk opened his eyes.

      The man screamed something and surged to his feet, a Kalashnikov bayonet flashing in his hand. McCarter leaned back in time to avoid the small bowie-shaped blade slashing at his gut, but the man lunged after him, and McCarter stumbled. The Tavor fell from his hands as the man tackled him. They rolled, coming up again, and the man charged with the blade before McCarter could take the initiative. The Briton had just enough to time to slap his hands down, knocking the knife aside, as he stepped in to slam the palm of his off hand up and under the man’s chin.

      The blow rocked the knifer onto his back. He rolled and came up again, shaking his head, his whole body trembling. McCarter saw the look of a true believer in his eyes, an expression he’d seen on many a fanatic and terrorist. The man came in again, close behind his knife, seeking McCarter’s flesh with the needle-sharp clip point.

      The Browning Hi-Power filled the Briton’s hand.

      “Drop the blade,” McCarter ordered.

      The knifer remained steady and focused.

      “Look, mate,” he said, trying to sound calm. “it’s over. We don’t want to kill you. We want to question you. Play it right and you could walk away from this.” While that last was, strictly speaking, a lie, McCarter needed the guy alive. There were too many questions to be answered, and they had about all they were likely to get from Gopalan. Something was afoot, something big, and if the Stony Man teams were to get to the bottom of it, they needed to start producing more answers than questions.

      The man lunged.

      McCarter swore and fired, putting a single round between the man’s eyes. There was no other choice; if he tried to play fancy trick-shooting games with a charging blade, it could mean his life. The would-be killer was dead before his body completed its fall to the catwalk, the knife clanging on the rusty metal.

      “Bloody hell,” McCarter said once more.

       CHAPTER FOUR

      The apartment building was as decrepit a structure as any the members of Able Team were likely to find in the area. Looking around, Carl Lyons shook his head. The buildings here had a sense of history. It was obvious this had once been a much better neighborhood. Now it was dying, rotting from the inside out, a victim of the animals who lived there and preyed on one another. Able Team had visited many such places in their battle against terror and crime. Still, even a hardened former cop and veteran counterterrorist like Lyons felt a pang of regret whenever he saw a place like this one, so badly gone to seed.

      They were dressed casually. Lyons wore a bomber jacket over denims, while Blancanales and Gadgets wore slacks, polo shirts and windbreakers. Their nondescript attire did nothing to conceal the weapons in their hands. Lyons would normally have moved much more discreetly, but they had received a scrambled call from the Farm only minutes before reaching their destination that morning. Phoenix Force had taken down an ambush in India, and no one knew precisely how the enemy was a step ahead of what the Stony Man teams were doing. Given that, the former L.A. detective didn’t intend to get blindsided. They were going in, yes, and they were going in hot.

      The target was an apartment building, and specifically a unit on its top floor. The site was part of the list produced by the Farm’s computer wizards. Each target on the priority-ordered list was linked to a person or persons of interest relevant to the WWUP or the ecoterror groups funding them, as Kurtzman had explained it. The fundamental mission had not changed. Both Able Team and Phoenix Force were shaking trees to see what fell out of them.

      These trees, of course, often bore lethal fruit.

      The shotgun Carl Lyons held in his calloused fists was a Daewoo USAS-12, a massive selective fire 12-gauge shotgun styled something like an M-16 and fitted with a 20-round polymer drum magazine. Lyons carried extra drums in the green canvas war bag slung across his chest. Schwarz and Blancanales carried similar bags. The rest of Lyons’s armament consisted of his personal handgun, the Colt Python, as well as a Columbia River Knife and Tool “M-16” tactical folding knife. The blades carried by the other team members were of the same brand but in different styles. Blancanales had opted for a fixed blade CRKT Ultima, while Schwarz carried an “M-18” folder model.

      Schwarz was armed with a Kissinger-tuned specialty, the silenced Beretta 93-R machine pistol, and several 20-round magazines were in the pouches of his web belt, under his windbreaker. Blancanales had opted for something a little less exotic, but no less effective—a short-barreled CAR-15 with a collapsible stock and vertical foregrip complete with flashlight unit.

      The three men took the stairs leading up to the target apartment with practiced precision, covering one another with Lyons in the lead.

      They had discussed the fastest way to breach the door to the apartment. Lyons’s first thought had been to use a portable battering ram of the type used by SWAT teams, but the warning from the Farm had nixed that plan. He did not want any member of Able Team to be vulnerable, even temporarily, if armed hostiles were waiting on the other side of the door. In the end he had simply loaded the Daewoo’s chamber with a fléchette breaching round. The first shot from the awesomely powerful weapon would be to take down the lock, after which Lyons and his teammates would blitz the door and overwhelm whoever was waiting on the other side.

      The hallways through which they walked were padded with stained, threadbare carpet, which softened the impacts of their combat boots. The hallways smelled of cooking food. Lyons could hear a baby crying through one of the doors on a lower floor; he signaled to Schwarz and Blancanales and frowned. His warning was clear. There were innocents nearby and they could risk no collateral casualties.

      Their earbud transceivers were active, but Lyons didn’t want to risk even a whisper as they neared the target doorway just past the top-floor landing. He signaled to his teammates, who took up positions on either side of the door to back him up. Lyons aimed the USAS-12 and braced himself. He looked to his teammates both of whom nodded.

      Lyons pulled the trigger.

      The shotgun blast disintegrated the lock. The big ex-cop immediately slammed the sole of his combat boot into the spot immediately left of the hole, slamming the flimsy hollow-core door open. He led Able Team into the apartment, his weapon sweeping the room for targets. Blancanales and Schwarz flanked him, taking opposite sides of the room as he advanced. They would sweep and clear in both directions, each man covering the other to prevent any nasty surprises.

      “Clear!” Lyons shouted. The living room was empty save for a broken and half-collapsed flea market sofa and an ancient console television boasting a bent pair of rabbit ears. Pizza boxes were piled in a corner of the room, next to two blue plastic bins into which empty beer and soda cans had been piled. While the apartment itself was typical of the hovels third-rate scumbags occupied, Lyons thought

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