LITMIR.BIZ

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to sprint after the vehicle. His carbine was slowing him, so he cast it aside. Without breaking stride, he yanked the 9 mm pistol from his web holster. There was no point in firing, however; the crate blocked his view of the driver.

      By the time Encizo reached the fallen tree, the ATV had left the meadow and begun to head down a narrow dirt path that threaded its way between outcroppings and a scattering of tall mountain pines. After a couple turns the vehicle had disappeared from view.

      Rather than take the trail, Encizo bounded onto the closest outcropping and followed it, leaping from rock to rock, hoping he wouldn’t lose his footing. He could still hear the ATV and tried his best to head in the same direction. Behind him, he could hear intermittent gunfire back in the meadow and figured Hawkins still had his hands full.

      After sixty yards, Encizo was forced to come to a stop. The outcropping had not only narrowed to a point, but it had also come to an abrupt end, leaving him poised at the edge of a sheer, forty-foot precipice.

      Another stream of expletives spilled from Encizo’s lips as he sized up his situation. He had two options: he could either backtrack the way he’d come or try to make his way down the sheer face of the cliff. In terms of catching up with the ATV, either way seemed futile. He could no longer even hear the vehicle, much less see it. Like it or not, it looked as if the enemy had gotten away.

      “Way to go, Rafe,” he chastised himself.

      Encizo was still deliberating his next move when he heard a rustling behind him. He whirled and saw that a mountain goat had appeared atop the outcropping twenty yards behind him. He wasn’t sure how it’d gotten there, but Encizo had a feeling the animal wasn’t about to let him pass. The goat, a full-grown male weighing more than two hundred pounds, stared intently at Encizo, then lowered its head slightly, tipping its horns forward.

      “I don’t think that’s a good sign,” Encizo whispered to himself. He was inching closer to the edge of the precipice when the goat suddenly lunged forward, lowering its head still further.

      Just as quickly, Encizo lowered himself over the side, seeking out the first available niches and protuberances for support. He’d make it a few yards down when the goat appeared at the edge of the precipice and stared down at him. Encizo stared back momentarily, then glanced over his shoulder, watching a handful of loose stones clatter down the side of the cliff before crashing against the hardpan below.

      “Not good,” Encizo muttered. “Not good…”

      “HELL, I FEEL like I’m trying to fly that damn supertank,” David McCarter groused.

      “It’s no Cobra, that’s for sure,” Gary Manning conceded.

      When the two men had landed at the airstrip two miles from where they’d jettisoned their teammates, they’d discovered that the two promised Cobra gunships had been deployed elsewhere. In their place, McCarter had found himself at the controls of a Sikorsky CH-54S Tarhe. Better known as the S-64 Skycrane, the Sikorsky was a forty-year-old hand-me-down that had first seen service in the early years of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. In fact, beneath its sun-faded layers of paint, the Skycrane still bore the insignia of the U.S. 478th Aviation Company. One of the largest helicopters ever built, the S-64 was an unarmed workhorse, designed primarily for lifting of up to ten tons of cargo: anything from 155 mm howitzers to the 4536 kg long-fuse bombs used create instant LZs in the Vietcong heartland. In this case, the chopper’s tailboom was rigged with a service pod containing a surgical operations facility. Also riding in the pod were six well-armed members, not of the militia—which was on its way up into mountains by foot and Jeep—but rather Spain’s special forces. Weighed down with such a heavy load, the chopper lumbered slowly through the air.

      Manning had his M-14 at the ready as he scouted the ridge-line of the mountain range they were flying over. In their haste to drop to their insertion point, none of the other Phoenix Force commandos had brought along communications gear, so McCarter and Manning had no idea what kind of situation they would find once they reached the meadow.

      “I’m glad we’ve got some backup in the belly of this sucker,” McCarter said, “but I’d trade them in a second for some bloody rocket pods and a nose gun.”

      “Maybe next time,” Manning said.

      Soon they cleared the peak and were within view of the meadow. At first, the only signs of disturbance they could see were the slain dog and a couple bullet-riddled sheep lying in the tall grass. Then Manning noticed several bodies lying amid the rocks on the south side of the mountain they’d just flown over.

      “Over there,” he told McCarter, pointing at the bodies.

      The Briton nodded, banking the chopper and coming in from a closer look. “Looks like our guys have been busy.”

      “Yeah,” Manning said, “but where are they?”

      The Skycrane’s shadow drifted across the meadow as Manning continued to scout for other signs of activity. He was about to point out a few more bodies near the fallen chestnut when the young shepherd boy raced out into view from beneath the canopy of the other trees. He waved wildly as he stared up at the chopper.

      “What the hell?” Manning murmured.

      “Let’s check it out,” McCarter said, slowly easing the Sikorsky downward.

      The boy backpedaled as the chopper’s rotor wash swept over him, flattening the grass around him. Even before the Skycrane had set down completely, the pod doors swung open and the Spanish troops crowded the opening. Once the landing wheels had touched ground, the men piled out, crouching over as they made their way clear of the rotors. Two of them beelined to the boy and began to question him; the others, most of them armed with MP-5 subguns, quickly fanned out in all directions, seeking out the enemy.

      “Those lads don’t waste any time, do they?” McCarter deadpanned as he killed the engines and unstrapped himself from the pilot’s chair.

      “Reminds me of us,” Manning observed, still scanning the surrounding meadow. “I still don’t see the guys.”

      “I don’t like it,” McCarter said, worry creeping into his voice. He reached for his holster, drawing a 7-round, .380 ACP EA-SA Compact.

      Once they’d deplaned, McCarter and Manning made their way to the two soldiers interrogating the shepherd boy. One of the men was the unit’s leader, Captain Raul Cordero, a tall, ruggedly handsome officer with dark eyes, thick brows and an equally thick mustache that only partially obscured his pronounced harelip. He was fluent in seven languages, including Basque and English.

      “He says they fought off the BLM, but one of your men was shot a few times in the side,” he reported to McCarter. “He says his father is ill, as well.”

      “Where are they?” McCarter wanted to know.

      “There,” the boy interjected, pointing in the direction of the shaded stone hut.

      “The wounded man,” McCarter asked the boy. “What does he look like?”

      “He is African,” the boy responded. “He was shot in the side. We can’t stop the bleeding.”

      “Go ahead and check it out,” Manning told McCarter. “I’ll get a couple stretchers.”

      Cordero told his subordinate to lend Manning a hand, then followed McCarter and the boy toward the hut. On the way, McCarter had the boy once again describe what had happened. He found out that Hawkins was with James, but that Encizo had last been seen chasing after an ATV carrying some kind of large wooden crate.

      “I’ll take the bird back up once we check on things here,” McCarter told Cordero.

      Once they reached the hut, the boy led the two men around back. There, Calvin James lay at the base of the rear window, several yards from the man the boy’s father had shot. Hawkins was crouched behind James, pressing a blood-soaked towel against the black man’s rib cage. Nearby, the old shepherd sat with his back to the stone wall, hunched over slightly, his ashen-faced glistening with perspiration.

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