LITMIR.BIZ

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boys know anything. If they don’t know you, at least you have the credentials Barb printed up. T.J., you think you know some Rangers assigned to this task force?”

      “If not, I can get in good with them after a few minutes. A lot of Special Forces troopers are good ol’ boys. A little jawin’, and I’ll flip ’em over to my way of thinking in no time.”

      “Right, whatever you said,” McCarter answered with a wink. “Just see what the good ol’ boys know about the local situation. Deep-down information that they might not have passed on through channels.”

      “And then we’re going to have to find a way off the base,” Hawkins added.

      “Stewart put us on lockdown?” Manning asked.

      Hawkins gave a curt nod. “Tighter than a frog’s ass. His orders were that nobody goes off base without his say-so.”

      McCarter shrugged. “Since when have we obeyed orders?”

      Manning cupped his chin in his hand, folding his other arm across his broad, barrel chest. His brow furrowed for a moment. “Are you counting simple orders like ‘get down’ and ‘hit ‘em’?”

      McCarter grinned. “All right, meet back here at 2200. We go over the fence at Oh-dark-hundred.”

      Hawkins and Manning took off, McCarter slipping into a fresh BDU shirt before they set out on their tasks. His shoulder felt stiff and ached, but the thought of revenge for the injury already deadened the pain.

      HERMANN SCHWARZ OPENED his gear locker in the back of the rented Econoline van that Able Team had loaded with weapons of war. While the standard gun cases were stored within cardboard boxes, Schwarz kept his portable locker in plain sight. The electronics equipment wouldn’t cause as much consternation on a simple traffic stop as Lyons’s and Blancanales’s rifles, handguns and submachine guns. Schwarz had his own weaponry, as well, hidden in the packing boxes, but the most important stuff, at least for surveillance, was right now at hand.

      “Give me a preview, Mr. Wizard,” Lyons said.

      Schwarz pulled out a telescope and attached a thermal imaging unit to it. The imager was one of his own designs, and had the power and range, even in full daylight, to see through flimsy walls into buildings. It was good for counting small numbers of people, but heavily crowded bars and clubs could provide a problem. Even then, if the mass of humanity was enough to make individual identification problematic, that was still important advance intelligence. He peered through the viewing reticle and furrowed his brow.

      “Ah, hell,” Schwarz said. “There’s a blob of them in there.”

      “Anyone outsized?” Lyons asked.

      “Outsized?” Schwarz shot his partner a confused glance.

      “Any giants or dwarfs?” Lyons asked. “Or can’t you cut it that fine?”

      “I could probably pick up one—Whoa—” Schwarz cut off. “Giant?”

      “Yeah.”

      “Someone just stepped into the back room,” Schwarz announced. “He was a head taller than anyone else in the bar.”

      Lyons slid into a leather jacket, then checked his shoulder holster and belt rig. In his belt, he had a Kissinger-tuned Colt 1911A1 pistol, while under his armpit, he had his .357 Colt Python. In the biker bar, he’d need every ounce of firepower and stopping power he could get. The heavy .45 pistol and its Magnum revolver counterpart would prove some serious medicine for dropping a rampaging biker, if worse came to worst.

      Lyons looked over to Blancanales. “Pol, you’re not going to be too popular with the biker crowd.”

      “You want me as backup?” Blancanales asked. He realized that Lyons was right. Outlaw bikers, the one-percenters as they called themselves, were fiercely jingoistic. They didn’t even like foreign-made guns, let alone Japanese motorcycles. Hispanics and blacks would be looked at as intruders, and at the very best, would leave covered in bruises.

      “Keep the driver’s seat warm,” Lyons said. “And get some heavy firepower to back up me and Gadgets.”

      Blancanales nodded, pulling a Heckler & Koch UMP-45 out of his case. The high-tech, .45-caliber submachine gun provided more punch than the 9 mm subguns the Able Team had carried in the past. The lightweight machine pistol was an optimal compromise between an M-16 and an Uzi, it could fire twenty-five fat, subsonic rounds, either with authoritative thunder or muffled silence with the right suppressor. With built-in rails for scopes and gun lights, as well as a polymer frame and stock, it was a featherweight, while still possessing awesome firepower. “I’ve got your back, Ironman.”

      Schwarz took a deep breath and put his surveillance equipment away, double-checking his gear. “Glock 23 and Kissinger Colt. Two magazines for each.”

      “Pocket a couple more,” Lyons suggested. “These guys might not give us much time to get some fresh ammo.”

      Schwarz nodded and pocketed a few fresh clips. “We’re not really here to just talk.”

      “It’s their choice,” Lyons answered solemnly.

      Schwarz did another check to make sure he could reach his guns easily. “I was afraid of that. Get ready to bail us out, Pol.”

      Blancanales was already affixing an M-203 grenade launcher to the rail under the UMP-45’s barrel. “Ready, willing and able.”

      “Real funny, Pol,” Schwarz commented, getting out of the van.

      Schwarz hopped down to the dirt, then looked over at Lyons whose face was a mask of intense concentration. He knew his buddy was in the zone, now. Focused, ready for anything, and he knew from experience that not even a platoon of Spetsnaz special forces soldiers could slow him when he was like that.

      The Skulls and Chains bar loomed in front of them, and when they were still a few feet from the small porch, still behind the wall of Harley-Davidson bikes, the front door slammed open. Two grim, burly bikers with shotguns burst into view, their faces twisted into rictuses of anger.

      Schwarz reached for his Colt and his Glock, and dived to one side. He knew, though, that things were going bad when the blast of the shotgun slammed into Carl Lyons’s chest, billowing out the lapels of his leather jacket.

      CHAPTER FIVE

      Calvin James toweled off the last of the droplets, slipped into a pair of silk boxers and tugged on his jeans. Barefoot and bare-chested, he glanced at himself in the mirror. The dip in Victoria Harbour had left him grungy and his old clothes, tossed into a heap in the corner of the changing area, were still damp and smelled of more than a little sewage.

      James wrinkled his nose at it, but in the end, he couldn’t blame the people living on the boats moored in the harbor. The sprawl of Hong Kong was crowded, and they went to water to escape the claustrophobic conditions. Living at sea meant that they could dump their garbage and refuse overboard. It wasn’t a swimming pool, and though China might have wanted to cut down on the pollution, they simply had no place to move the people in the floating slum.

      So they ignored it, just like the provisional Hong Kong government had in the century before.

      He picked up his belt and slid the anchoring loops of his Galco Jackass rig over it, threading it through his new pants. Pulling on a fresh T-shirt, he slipped his arms through the loops, then looked at the disassembled Glock 34 by the sink.

      Rafael Encizo had won the contest as to who would get to rinse off the grime of the harbor first, but that also meant that he was still working on the polymer pistols. He laid them out and was running the hotel room’s complimentary hair dryer over the damp mechanisms. Though the polymer and coated steel components were as close to rustproof as possible, the dunking and firing underwater was an unusual stress on the pistols, and they wanted to be sure that the handguns would be in perfect working order. Encizo’s big and little

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