LITMIR.BIZ

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arm and hand sprawled in the mud. There was a bracelet of hammered metal around the delicate wrist and the fingers had frozen in rigor mortis.

      McCarter looked up the street in both directions but saw nothing. He crouched and reached across with his left hand to his right boot and pulled a Gerber Guardian straight blade from his boot sheath. He stepped into the pen, ignoring the squish of mud and shit in the straw under his feet.

      The animal bleated again and McCarter shushed it reflexively. He reached down and slid the double-edged blade into the loop of twine around the animal’s neck. He flicked his wrist and severed the rope. The goat walked to the edge of the pen and began munching on the straw that had been out of its reach before.

      McCarter slowly sank to one knee. He slid the Gerber back into its boot sheath and bent forward, looking into the hutch. The shadows were deep in the tiny space. He saw the arm running back into the dark. McCarter blinked and the shadow resolved into the shape of a woman.

      She was young and dead, with opaque eyes staring out at him. There was a bloody open gash in her forehead where a bullet had punched in. He looked away.

      McCarter rose slowly out of his crouch. He heard a man call out several streets over and he froze. The language was French. Someone farther out from that answered him in the same language. Anger made McCarter grit his teeth. He swallowed a lump of bile that had formed like a rock in his throat.

      Despite his anger he was more concerned by the mystery of the European voice. He had to keep his mind on the operation, focus his thoughts.

      The men who had murdered this woman were human, just like him. They were killers, just like him. But they were nothing like him, nor he anything like them. To reduce violence to an evil unto itself, without regard to the circumstances that spawned it, was a philosophical arrogance McCarter could not stomach.

      Securing his grip on the butt of his pistol, he walked over to the edge of the animal pen between the two houses and looked out into the narrow street. The incessant rain dimpled the puddles with the weight of its falling drops. He opened a little gate and stepped out into the street, leaving it open behind him.

      He crouched, turned and made eye contact with James, who nodded. As his Phoenix Force colleagues shuffled forward behind him he hunted the darkness for unfamiliar shapes. The team had stumbled onto the middle of something, he knew, and he needed to get a handle on it and fast.

      Once Phoenix Force was in position he began to move toward the compound, walking quickly with his weapon ready. He reached the edge of a round, one-story silo and looked carefully around it. A short passageway between buildings linked the main street with the secondary alley McCarter now navigated.

      About twenty yards down a man stood with his back to McCarter. The ex–SAS commando narrowed his eyes in suspicion. The man wasn’t dressed like a rough mountain tribesman. He wore a night suit bristling with all the paraphernalia and accoutrements of the modern special-operations soldier. For some reason only night-vision goggles were missing.

      McCarter lifted his carbine in a slow, smooth gesture. He straightened his arm and placed the sights squarely on the occipital lobe of the terrorist soldier’s skull. His finger curled around the trigger of the carbine and took up the slack.

      The combatant looked to his left and lifted a fist above his head in some prearranged signal. McCarter shuffled sideways across the narrow mouth of the alley, his weapon tracking the man’s back with every step as he moved.

      Once on the other side of the alleyway, McCarter slid around a corner and put his back against the wall and turned his face back toward the dirt lane he had just crossed. He drew the Beretta 92-F in an even, deliberate motion. He held the pistol up so that the muzzle was poised beside the hard plane of his cheek bone. He bent slightly at the knee and crouched before risking a glance around the edge of the building.

      He looked over to where James was crouched motionless behind cover. He put a finger to his lips in a pantomime for quiet then pointed at his own eyes and at the European operative. James nodded once.

      McCarter prepared for his kill.

       CHAPTER SEVEN

      Dominican Republic

      The sawmill squatted on the banks of the Ozama River. Silent as a mausoleum, the building stood surrounded by warehouses and industrial structures now fallen dark, or burned to rubble in the wake of successive riots and civil unrest. Rain fell, dirty gray from the sky.

      Rosario Blancanales drew his mouth into a tight line. He scanned the building and the area around it through his night-vision goggles, searching for telltale smeary silhouettes in the monochromatic green of the high-tech device. He saw nothing. The sounds of traffic came to him from the other areas of the city, muted across the distance. Close by, his ears detected only the whisper of cold wind skipping across the polluted river.

      Outfitted from the cache at the safehouse, Able Team had arrived at the meeting set up by the missing FBI agent.

      Next to the Puerto Rican Special Forces veteran, Lyons scrutinized the building, determining his approach. To the rear of the building loading docks with big roll-up bay doors sat shut and locked.

      On the side of the building closest to him stood a maintenance door set on a short flight of concrete steps. Off in the distance, Lyons heard the soft thump-thump of a relief agency helicopter cruising low over the city.

      Lyons again scanned the area through his goggles.

      Santo Domingo was a city locked down under martial law, threatened by civil unrest and criminal gangs threatening to overrun their squalid ghettos. Police units patrolled in armored personnel carriers, and army checkpoints secured every major road and highway leading into the city.

      Able Team had taken a grave risk by going armed into the streets of a supposedly allied nation dealing with the threat of a violent insurrection. An insurrection with increasingly apparent ties to the worldwide narcotics syndicates. Moving incognito had proved nearly impossible.

      Lyons moved forward, scrambling out of the empty drainage ditch running parallel to the abandoned sawmill’s main building. He approached a chain-link fence and dropped down, removing wire cutters from his combat harness. With deft, practiced movements Lyons snipped an opening and bent back one edge.

      Blancanales held the wire up while Schwarz remained outside the building to provide security and surveillance.

      Lyons slid through head first and popped up on the other side. Blancanales crawled through and they began their approach. Traveling in a wide crescent designed to take them as far as possible from the silent street, Lyons approached the single maintenance entrance on the building’s side. He scanned the triple row of windows set above the building’s ground floor for any sign of movement. As he neared the building Lyons pulled a Glock 17 from his shoulder rig. The weapon had come from the safehouse armory but was not his first choice in handguns.

      Lyons crab-walked up the short flight of concrete stairs leading to the door, clicking the selector switch off safety on his pistol as he moved. Behind him Blancanales tracked the muzzle of his own pistol through zones of fire.

      Reaching the door, Lyons pulled a lock-pick gun from a cargo pocket and slid it expertly home into the lock as Blancanales maintained security.

      The ex–LAPD detective squeezed the trigger on the lock device and heard the bolt securing the door snap back. Replacing the lock-pick gun, Lyons put a hand on the door, holding his 9 mm pistol up and ready. He looked over at Blancanales, who nodded wordlessly.

      Before he moved, Lyons took a final scan of his surroundings. The industrial wasteland was eerily still. Taking a breath, he turned the handle and pulled open the door.

      Stony Man Farm, Virginia

      BARBARA PRICE CRADLED her phone next to her ear and took the clipboard and pen from the Farm’s head of security, a former Marine, Buck Greene. On the other end of the com link Hal Brognola queried Price further.

      “There has to be more than that, Barb,” he said.

      “I

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