LITMIR.BIZ

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four-man assault squad fell into a loose Ranger file with McCarter leading and Manning with his machine gun bringing up the rear. For McCarter the movement to target held a surreal quality. The stark, denuded geography seemed like a moonscape through the filtering lens of their commercial night-vision goggles. Each footfall sent puffs of pale dust billowing up, and there was the constant companion of high-altitude wind.

      Around them the bare tops of hills rising from a lightly wooded river valley sat like a twisting barrier to the grasslands just beyond, stretching all the way toward the Chinese border.

      Moving quickly, the team linked up with Hawkins and moved into position above a narrow switchback in an ancient dirt road carved out decades ago through the low mountains. McCarter called a halt and the team took three minutes to drink water from their canteens.

      Once again Hawkins with his telescopic lens was dispatched to the periphery of the formation to provide security as the other four members of Phoenix Force prepped the assault site. Wooden-handled Soviet entrenching tools quickly hacked narrow holes into the side of the earth. Belay pinions were shoved in and buried, forming dead man hangs that allowed the team to deploy their rappel ropes.

      “I’ve got the scout vehicle at the bottom of the canyon,” Hawkins said, breaking radio silence.

      McCarter narrowed his eyes and turned his ear into the chill bite of the wind. On the air he could clearly make out the throaty growls of heavy engines climbing a steep grade in low gear. “Copy,” he told Hawkins. Turning back toward his teammates, he gave terse directions. “We have initial eyes on. Snap into ropes and ready weapons.”

      Without comment all four commandos snapped their ropes into the D-ring carabiners of their rappel harnesses. Once locked into their drop rigs, Calvin James and Rafael Encizo quickly laid out several warheads and primed their RPGs. Beside them Gary Manning methodically dropped down the folding legs on his machine gun’s bipod and settled into position on the flank of the hit squad, poised to pour 7.62 mm rounds down the steep incline and onto the road below.

      There was a harsh metallic click as he racked the bolt and chambered the first round on his belt. “Terrorist surprise package hot,” he declared in a soft self-satisfied voice.

      McCarter grunted in response and slid home a high-explosive 40 mm grenade into his M-203 launcher. Once he was locked and loaded he pulled his Combat Personal Data Assistant out from a Cordura and Kevlar pouch. The CPDA had a commercial housing that on initial inspection hid the electronic upgrades provided by Stony Man’s technical section.

      McCarter turned his head away from the bite of the omnipresent and icy breeze, bringing his finger up to key his mic. “Stony, you have eyes over target?”

      “Affirmative,” Price replied.

      “Send signal to my hand unit for final confirmation,” McCarter instructed.

      Having given his instructions, McCarter held up the CPDA and opened the screen to the digital feed. So far every aspect of their intelligence had been correct, but he wanted to have absolute confirmation that he wasn’t accidentally taking down a civilian caravan before he turned Phoenix Force loose on the line of vehicles below.

      On his screen the satellite feed appeared, the line of vehicles appearing as white outlines against the cold dark of the Kyrgyzstan geography. The hoods of the trucks glowed slightly from the reflected heat of the hardworking engines and the headlights flashed in hard shards of illuminations. With all the reflected light McCarter was able to clearly pick out the six vehicles of the convoy.

      Two commercial four-wheel-drive pickups ran at the front of the vehicle line, followed by three Russian army five-ton trucks with canvas sheaths over the rear storage compartments. The final big truck was uncovered, leaving the several men of the gun crew exposed. Four men in loose turban-style headgear manned a 20 mm antiaircraft gun.

      McCarter felt like purring as he clicked his push-to-talk button on the com uplink. “I have visual confirmation of target,” he told Stony Man.

      “You are cleared to engage,” Barbara Price informed him.

       CHAPTER FOUR

      Dominican Republic

      Able Team was a direct-action unit that identified its targets and went forward until enemy combatants had been neutralized in one fashion or another. Capable of stealth and subterfuge, the team was a trio of extremely fit, extremely confident special operators used to sizing up all manner of opposition—soldiers, police, criminals and spies. It wasn’t hard to identify the hard-eyed Carl Lyons and more laconic features of Rosario Blancanales and Hermann Schwarz as experienced ass kickers.

      The sun was low in the sky, radiating heat like a flamethrower, and the humidity was so thick it felt like a hanging curtain as Able Team approached the customs police in a loose triangle with Lyons at the front.

      Recognizing the potential for trouble, the four guards dropped hands to the grips of weapons and stiffened their posture. The leader of the group, an extremely dark-skinned islander with a seemingly fleshless skull, threw a half-smoked cigarette to the ground and let it smolder.

      As the three Stony Man operatives approached, Blancanales and Schwarz drifted out a few steps to the side, turning their approach wedge in a softly enveloping semicircle that kept the bodies of the customs officers trapped between themselves and the frame of their vehicle.

      Sensing trouble but seeing no weapons, the officer took a step forward and opened his mouth to bark an order.

      Lyons lifted up a meaty fist and snapped it forward down his center line in an old-school karate punch. The first two knuckles of his fist slammed into the custom officer’s chin, his jaw hanging loose as he prepared to speak. The hinge joint where the jawbone joined the skull was rammed backward, mauling the nerves centered there. The officer went down like a pole-axed steer in a Chicago stockyard, instantly unconscious.

      Hermann Schwarz moved in close to his target, his limbs tracing predetermined combative patterns. His left hand slapped the barrel of his man’s weapon to one side, his right hand snapping once in a short jab to the man’s solar plexus that doubled him over, followed by a hook that took the man flush along his temple and dropped him instantly.

      On the opposite side of Lyons from Schwarz, ex–Special Forces soldier Rosario Blancanales hammered into his own opponent. The Puerto Rican commando slammed his left hand against the forestock of the man’s rifle, pushing it hard into the startled Dominican’s chest and trapping it against the torso.

      Caught by surprise, the man’s first instinct was to clutch his weapon even more tightly, slowing his response to the attack. Immediately, Blancanales snapped the edge of his right hand into the side of the Dominican’s neck, striking the officer along his carotid sinus. The man’s eyes rolled upward until only whites showed and he crumpled to the ground at his feet.

      The final officer had time to swing a clumsy over-hand buttstroke toward Lyons, who deflected it with the palm of his hand before catching the overmatched soldier on the angle of his chin with a powerful boxer’s hook that dropped him.

      “Let’s go,” Lyons snapped, jumping to work.

      Quickly they used the downed men’s own handcuffs to secure them before stripping weapons, a cell phone, vehicle ignition keys and an ancient Motorola handheld walkie-talkie from the checkpoint officers.

      “Do you think three white dudes in a government-marked jeep will be suspicious?” Schwarz asked, voice wry, as he fired up the vehicle.

      “Speak for yourself, Mr. White Guy,” Blancanales said as he jumped in the back seat and pushed the police weapons out of obvious sight.

      “Just try to look official until we can get a different ride,” Lyons said.

      Schwarz pushed the accelerator down and gunned the jeep down the asphalt service road running behind the airport and toward Santo Domingo. Beside him Lyons was using thick fingers to triangulate a GPS-guided route on the screen of his CPDA.

      Ahead

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