LITMIR.BIZ

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him in particular.”

      Price smiled. “You read my mind, Carmen,” she said. “Once we have Phoenix and Able taken care of, why don’t you send me a summary in case anything comes of it.”

      “Will do.” Delahunt nodded. “I have to double-check the South American arraignments we made for the team’s extraction with the ‘package’—if it comes to that. It’s nice to be able to tap the resources of larger groups like the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command, but coordination is a nightmare.”

      “Let me know if anything goes wrong,” Price said.

      Delahunt nodded, then turned and began walking back across the floor toward the connecting door to the Annex’s Computer Room, her fingers punching out a number on her encrypted cell phone.

      Barbara Price smiled.

      She could feel the energy, the sense of purpose that permeated the room, flow into her. Out there in the cold, eight men on two teams were about to enter into danger for the sake of their country. If they got into trouble, if they needed anything, they would turn to her and her people.

      She did not intend to let them down.

      She made her way to her desk, where a light flashing on her desktop phone let her know a call was holding. She looked over at Kurtzman and saw the man returning a telephone handset to its cradle. He pointed toward her.

      “It’s Hal on line one,” he said.

      “Thanks, Bear,” she answered.

      She set her coffee down and picked up the handset as she sank into her chair. She put the phone to her ear and tapped a key on her computer, knocking the screen off standby mode.

      “Hal, it’s Barb,” she said.

      “I’m outside the Oval Office right now,” Brognola said. “Are the boys up and rolling?”

      “As we speak,” Price answered. “Tell him operations are prepped to launch at his word.”

      “All right. Let’s hope this one goes by the numbers,” the gruff federal agent said.

      “As always,” she agreed, and hung up.

      “All right, people,” she announced to the room. “Let’s get ready to roll.”

      Nairobi, Kenya

      PHOENIX FORCE MET UP in the capital and transferred to the Sikorsky MH-53 Pave Low helicopter. To them their mission was simple: go in and find a lone American survivor of a brutal attack. It didn’t matter that an entire army of heavily armed insurgents had taken him into a city turned into a hellish fortress.

      They would proceed, always moving forward.

      FOR ABLE TEAM THE MISSION evolved in a more circumspect manner.

      In the back of the Lear jet taking them to the Farm the three-man team relaxed, unwinding from the mission. Thirty minutes into the flight, Stony Man pilot Jack Grimaldi opened the cockpit door.

      “I got Barb on secure communications,” he told them. “I don’t think you guys are going home yet.”

      “Perfect,” Blancanales said, laughing.

      Nicaragua

      ABLE TEAM’S PLAN WAS simple.

      They would come in on a commercial flight and make it through customs clean. Following that, they would pick up a vehicle and make their way to a safehouse used by a joint CIA and Army Special Operations Intelligence Support Activity operation to establish a base before starting surveillance of the target.

      Things began to go wrong immediately.

      Carl Lyons pulled his carry-on bag down from the overhead compartment just after the Unfasten Seat Belts sign popped up on the TWA commercial flight. They were flying first-class as part of their administrative cover, and the team leader had watched, bemused, as Blancanales had seduced the Hispanic flight attendant with his gregarious charm.

      Team funnyman Hermann Schwarz had cracked one stale joke after another as the silver-haired smooth-talker had reaffirmed his membership in the mile-high club thirty thousand feet over the Caribbean with a dark-eyed Nicaraguan beauty half his age.

      In a more regulation-orientated unit such behavior as stand-up sex in an airplane restroom would have been a scandalous breach of operational security, one that a team leader like Lyons would have had to treat severely as a discipline issue.

      Not so in the shadowy world in which Able Team operated. Now there wasn’t a person on the plane among the crew or passengers who didn’t think the three men were anything but what they claimed; middle-aged divorced tourists on a Central American vacation. Blancanales’s audacity was role-playing brilliance.

      If there was anything bothering Lyons as he exited the plane after the flight attendant had slipped her cell number to Blancanales, it was that circumstances dictated they roll into the opening moves of the operation unarmed. Carl Lyons didn’t like taking a shower unarmed, let alone enter a potentially volatile nation without a weapon.

      “Okay,” Schwarz murmured as they came into the big, air-conditioned terminal, “we can add a certain TWA flight attendant named Bonita to our roster of Stony Man local assets.”

      “Oh, yeah,” Lyons replied. “I’m sure she’ll be a big help. We can just send David and his boys down here sometime and they can all crash at her hacienda. It’ll be like the Farm South.”

      “You see how it is, Gadgets?” Blancanales said, voice weary. “You try to take one for the team and management doesn’t appreciate it. I try to show loyalty through service and all I get is cynical pessimism.”

      “Oh, buddy,” Schwarz replied, voice dry as south Texas wind, “you just got a lot more on you than cynical pessimism.”

      “Yes,” Blancanales replied seriously. “Yes, I did.”

      “Can you gentlemen come this way?”

      The voice interrupted their banter with the certainty of undisputed authority. Able Team turned their heads as one to take in the speaker. He was a tall Latino with jet-black hair, mustache and eyes and was wearing the crisp uniform of a Nicaraguan customs officer. There was a 9 mm automatic pistol in a polished holster on his hip but the flap was closed and secured.

      However, a few paces behind him the assault rifles of the military security guards were right out and open as the soldiers stood with hands on pistol grips and fingers resting near triggers.

      Lyons scowled. Schwarz gave the officer his best grin in reply to the summons. Then he turned his head slightly and whispered to Blancanales out of the side of his mouth, “Any chance you want to take one for the team now?”

      Blancanales fixed an insincere grin of his own on his face. “Nope. This time we move right to cynical pessimism,” he replied. He turned to face the stern uniformed officer, face suddenly serious. “This isn’t about that flight attendant, is it?”

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      Nicaraguan customs separated the three men quickly, hustling them into separate rooms. There they sat, isolated, for two hours. Carl Lyons found himself sitting in front of a plain metal table on an uncomfortable folding chair while the customs officer pretended to read official-looking papers he’d taken from a blue folder with a government seal at the top.

      Fluent in Spanish, Lyons easily read the pages he set on the tabletop and saw that they were merely quarterly flight maintenance reports being used as props. Warily, Lyons decided to relax a bit; this seemed a more random occurrence than he had first feared. The Farm had considerable resources, but the operation was minuscule compared to other government agencies and Stony Man operatives were often forced to rely on logistical support from larger bureaucratic entities. Whenever that happened, security became a prime concern, but for now this seemed a more typical customs roust than anything more threatening.

      The officer,

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