“I don’t like this,” Encizo muttered, looking around quickly. There didn’t seem to be any other way out of the barracks. “Which means that either we missed something or else…”
A ghostly whimper interrupted the thought, closely followed by a man’s cruel laugh.
This was it! McCarter realized, the knowledge sending adrenaline pumping through his veins. The slavers were right on the other side of the stone walls. But where was the bleeding entrance?
Switching his goggles from UV to IR, Hawkins saw nothing unusual. He knew the team was missing something obvious, but what? They could start tossing grenades, but the moment they started, the jig was up for the girls.
Removing his goggles, McCarter pulled out a flashlight and clicked on the bright halogen light. Sweeping the beam around the barracks, he saw the hidden door immediately. Every one of the brass plaques on the wall was above a sleeping pallet, except one located on a black wall, the brass tarnished and dirty.
Clicking off the light, McCarter pressed the plaque and the nearby pallet slid aside silently on greased tracks. Worn stone steps led down again. The sound of laughter was louder.
“Just like Afghanistan,” Hawkins whispered, readying a stun grenade. When the Soviet Union had invaded the ancient country, their battle tanks had been meet by booby traps designed centuries ago for Roman war chariots. Hinged sections of road opened wide and a tank dropped fifty feet onto solid granite. What killed horses two thousand years ago, only stunned the crew of the tank. But before they could recover, the Afghans poured gasoline through the air vents of the armored transport and burned the Soviets alive. Grisly, but effective.
Moving swiftly along the flight of stairs, the commandos found themselves descending into a huge natural cave. The floor below was lined with rows upon rows of steel cages, young woman lying inside on piles of dirty straw.
Like animals in a zoo, James noted, feeling a furious coldness swell deep inside.
Several of the prisoners were weeping, the sound echoing slightly off the hard walls of the cave. Reaching the floor, McCarter switched to IR again, searching for any hot spots. Immediately he saw the rectangle of a door set into the far wall, the outline glowing with warmth. Jackpot.
The Stony Man team headed that way, moving past the rows of cages in the dark. The smell from the dirty straw was foul. There were no bathroom facilities for the prisoners. Obviously another part of the process designed to break their spirit. The soldiers hardened their hearts and concentrated on the mission. If the team started freeing the girls, some would began to shout, alerting the slavers. The only way to release them all was to take out the Sardinians first.
A soldier’s burden, Hawkins thought grimly, trying to ignore the sobbing teenagers.
A guard armed with a cattle prod was sleeping in a chair beside the door. Manning and James grabbed his arms as McCarter clapped a hand across the man’s mouth and slit his throat with a fast slash of a Gerber combat knife. The guard awoke drowning in his own blood and thrashed wildly for a few moments before going still.
With the sound of the dead man’s life dripping onto the floor, Encizo went to the door and ran a check with the EM scanner. It was clean, no traps this time.
Hawkins took point again and tried the latch. It moved easily and the door swung aside on loud creaking hinges. Damn! The big Southerner brought up his MP-5 fast, but the next room was empty.
As their goggles adjusted to the bright electric lights, the Stony Many commandos saw rubber mats on the rock floor making paths through the torture chamber. There was no other word for the place. Gleaming steel tolls hung from hooks on the walls, and heavy wooden stocks, looking like something from the Middle Ages, were situated over rusty drains. Ripped clothing was piled to the side, mostly T-shirts and swimming suits. A stainless steel surgical table was filled with personal items, rings, eyeglasses, hair clips and such. Video cameras were mounted on tripods to record the humiliating strip, and the air was redolent with the smell of pine disinfectant. A hose lay coiled in a corner, the nozzle trickling water down a drain.
This must be where the girls were first taken to be stripped of everything from the outside world. A wooden butcher’s block was surrounded by the remains of cell phones that had been smashed into useless rubbish, and the hopper of a nearby shredder was filled with the remains of wallets and credit cards. The last hope of escape was destroyed right before the helpless captives.
Across the room was a door made of burnished steel.
Moving in that direction, the team tightened their grips on the weapons as the metal door opened and out walked a whistling man with a coiled whip in his hand. The slaver paused, registering shock at the unexpected sight of a group of armed soldiers inside the underground base, then McCarter shot him in the face with the crossbow.
The barbed quarrel came out the back of his head, and the dying man wheezed in pain as he eased to the rubber mats on the floor. Already at the door, Hawkins kept it from closing completely with a knife blade, while Encizo and James pulled the rings from grenades.
A guttural voice laughed harshly and several men responded in Sardinian. The words almost made sense, the language was so close to Italian, but there were just enough differences to render it incomprehensible.
“Please,” a young woman cried out in English. “My father is a senator! He’ll pay anything you want for me! Anything!”
“We make more, you go Sudan,” the first voice said in halting English. “Big show, daughter American senator.”
There came the sound of ripping cloth, and the young woman screamed.
Instantly, Hawkins pulled open the door, Encizo and James tossed in their grenades, and the rest of Phoenix Force moved in with their weapons firing. A group of men was clustered around a young woman dressed only in bra and panties. They turned at the noise, cursed and shoved her aside to claw for the handguns in their belts.
Aiming carefully, McCarter put an arrow through the throat of a bald man holding a fistful of blouse, then dropped the weapon and pulled around his MP-5. Hawkins shot a Sardinian in the forehead, then rocked back as an incoming round hit him in the belly.
On the count of eight, the stun grenades detonated while still rolling along the floor, the bright flashes filling the room. Blinded by the light, the Sardinians began to shoot wildly, one of them blowing the face off the slaver standing right alongside. The glowing streaks of tracer rounds filled the air.
Over near a video-mixing board, two men worked the bolts on their Kalashnikov assault rifles, chambering rounds. Encizo took out one, Hawkins the other. The Sardinians died with their life blown out the backs of their chests.
Shooting as carefully as if he was at a gun range, Manning placed four rapid head shots in a row, taking out the men clustered around the console.
Diving forward, James tackled the terrified girl to the floor to get her out of the line of fire, trying to keep her covered with his body. He grunted as a bullet hit his back, the NATO body armor under his fatigues deflecting the slug with a sharp whine. Screaming hysterically, the girl began pummeling the Stony Man operative with her soft fists.
“Delta Force, ma’am,” James grunted as he took another bullet in the back. “You want to shut the fuck up and let us rescue you?”
Instantly she stopped struggling and looked into his face, tears of hope welling in her eyes. He could see that she had been badly beaten, her nose broken, and there were teeth missing, fresh blood smeared on her cheek and shoulder.
“Kill them,” she begged with a sob in her voice. “Please kill them all.”
“That’s the plan,” James replied, pulling out his Beretta and firing directly into the groin of a man coming their way loading a shotgun. Dropping the weapon, the slaver shrieked and tried to get away. James shot the man in the back, then again in the spine as the bleeding gunner started to slide limply down the wall.
A few moments later it was over and Phoenix Force quickly reloaded their weapons before going into the next room. Rising stiffly, James hauled the girl back to the entrance, hustling her away to safety. The first part of the mission was done. Now came the hard part—burning out this nest of vipers.
Kicking open the door, McCarter found a short corridor lined with curtained alcoves. It reminded him of a brothel he had raided once in Hong Kong. The implications were horribly clear, and he shoved the stubby barrel of the machine gun into the first sex room, seeking a target. A naked girl was strapped to small bed, a naked man trying to get a handgun free from the tangle of his clothing draped over a chair. McCarter stitched the slaver from groin to face, then departed while reloading. They’d come back later for the prisoners. This wasn’t over yet by a long shot. The element of surprise was gone, and the Sardinians would start fighting back for real at any second. Every tick of the clock was a mark against the Stony Man commandos. This had to be a blitz.
Standing in a doorway, Hawkins was holding back a curtain and firing his MP-5 in short bursts, the spent brass arching away to bounce off the wooden jamb. Men screamed from within the alcove, followed by silence.
Going to the next curtain, Encizo paused and the fabric started to jump from the outgoing lead. He waited until the firing stopped, then swept in low, catching the bare-chested slaver as he dropped a spent clip from his Skorpion machine pistol. The little Cuban stroked the trigger and sent a wreath of 180-grain, steel-jacketed vengeance into the slaver.
Cringing behind a chair, a middle-aged woman stared at the act with a growing expression of delight. As the Sardinian fell, she leaped forward to pull a knife from his belt and attacked the riddled corpse in mindless fury.
Finishing another alcove, McCarter paused at the sight of his reflection moving in a wall mirror. Acting on a hunch, he fired into the glass, and a man fell out holding an AP grenade. As it rolled into sight, McCarter saw the ring was still attached. That had been too close! The NATO body armor they wore was good, but it didn’t make a man invulnerable to head shots or concussion damage. Warily, the Briton checked inside the closet for any more hardmen and found a flight of stairs leading deeper into the earth. Patting his chest, the Stony Man commando found that he was out of stun grenades. Returning to the room, he grabbed the AP grenade from the floor and tossed it down the stairs. As the lethal sphere bounced men shouted in fear and there came the sound of running boots.
Jumping down the short flight, McCarter landed in a crouch and saw a rough-hewn tunnel filled with men holding guns. Dodging to the left, the Phoenix Force leader opened fire with the MP-5, mowing them down. A few of the slavers fired back, the rounds ricocheting off the rock walls. When the clip was empty, McCarter pulled his 9 mm Browning Hi-Power and waded into the dying bodies, finishing off anybody who wasn’t obviously dead.
Clearing out the last alcove, Manning reloaded his MP-5 just as a fat man rushed around a corner blasting away with an M-16. Coolly, Manning took out the fellow with a burst in the chest, then moved past the falling body to sneak a peek around the corner.
About a dozen men were opening plastic crates. A couple Sardinians were donning NBC suits, and the rest buckling on harnesses for XM-214 electric miniguns. Just one of those weapons could chew the Stony Man team into hamburger, and if the hardmen released VX gas into the prehistoric warren, everybody would die, including the girls still trapped in the cages.
“They’ve got VX and miniguns,” Manning subvocalized into his throat mike, arming his last stun grenade. He couldn’t risk rupturing the nerve-gas canisters.
Staying low, Encizo joined Manning just as a roaring hellstorm of lead blasted out of the room as the miniguns chewed a deep gap into the corner and wall, throwing off an explosion of splinters. In unison, the two Stony Man commandos tossed their stun grenades around the corner, then quickly retreated.
As the grenades flashed into a triple flare, the slavers walked through the blinding light, firing their weapons everywhere, the spinning barrels of the miniguns vomiting high-velocity lead.
Crossing the streams, the Sardinian criminals chewed twin paths of destruction along the hallway and into the alcoves. Most of the curtains had been torn down, and they could see inside with no trouble. Still hacking at the corpse, the middle-aged woman was torn to bits.
Marching over the bodies of their fallen comrades, the two gunners proceeded into the studio, searching for the enemy, assuming it to be the Italian army again. But they could hardly believe the fools ever found their base, much less got this far inside. But the studio was also empty. Easing his grip on the firing handle, one of the Sardinians asked a muttered question. But the other man merely shrugged, uncertain of what to do next.
In the destroyed hallway, two of the bodies lying under the torn curtains raised into kneeling positions, and the Stony Man commandos cut loose with their MP-5 machine guns at point-blank range. The Sardinians flew backward from the concentrated barrage, their miniguns briefly firing to hammer at the stone ceiling before going as silent as the dead slavers.
Walking forward, Hawkins administrated a shot directly into the face of each Sardinian, just to make sure. Then Encizo pulled the power cords from the miniguns, rendering them inoperable.
“Okay, let’s finish this,” Manning said, slinging his machine gun. Pulling a Desert Eagle from a holster on his hip, the man clicked off the safety. His KGB Special didn’t have anywhere near enough stopping power for this next part.
Slinging their machine guns, Hawkins and Encizo prepared their own handguns as they walked down the hallway, past the alcoves. There was a fast flurry of gunfire, then three slow deliberate shots.
Appearing in the smashed mirror, David McCarter carefully studied the war zone outside the alcove before emerging with his MP-5 in one hand and a thick book tucked under the other arm.
As he moved followed, the members of his team came around the corner.
“All clear?” McCarter asked.
The soldiers nodded.
“Well, I found the sales ledger,” McCarter announced, tapping the fat volume with the hot barrel of the machine gun.
“Great,” Hawkins muttered, working out a jam from his MP-5. “Then let’s get out of this shithole.” Saving the girls had been the mission priority, but this was the prize. The names and address in the book would send dozens of men and women to the gas chamber. Or whatever method of execution their assorted countries used to execute criminals in these so-called enlightened days. Hawkins had seen enough death in his career to understand that making somebody wait ten years on death row was a cruel and unusual punishment. A bullet to the back of the head was swift and painless, carrying much more mercy and compassion than the cannibals of society ever showed to their victims.
“I’ll call in the rescue planes. Find some blankets, spare clothing, anything like that, and go help Calvin open the cages,” McCarter directed. “And be gentle. The girls have been through double hell. If anybody doesn’t want to leave her cage, then just unlock the door and let her be. To them, we’re just another bunch of ugly guys with guns.”
“Ugly?” Manning almost smiled at that, then he turned to Hawkins. “Must be talking about you.”
Finally clearing the jam, Hawkins gave a snort. “Ugly in Texas is beautiful everywhere else in the world.”
“I’ve been to Dallas, brother, and that dog won’t hunt.”
“Yeah, right.”
“How about we bring along a peace offering?” Encizo suggested, reaching down to grab a dead Sardinian by the collar. He lifted the bloody corpse off the floor. “To show our goodwill.”
“Now you’re talking sense,” Hawkins said, slinging the machine gun.
As the Stony Man operatives walked away, dragging the dead slavers along behind, McCarter worked the transceiver on his belt. The civilian cell phones would never have worked this deep underground, but the team had left a repeater unit hidden in the bushes on the surface. “Rock House, this is Firebird One,” he said, touching his throat mike. “The clubhouse is clear, and the goods have been recovered.”
“Excellent. Any breakage?” Barbara Price said, her voice wavering slightly from the interference of the surrounding rock.
Resting the hot barrel of the MP-5 machine gun on his shoulder, McCarter looked sideways at the woman in the alcove. “Yes,” he said in a flat voice. “Send body bags along with the medics.”
“Confirm. Sorry to hear that.” Price sighed. “I’ll contact the NATO frigate waiting offshore and have the prisoners picked up ASAP. As soon as the rescue helicopters arrive, proceed to your former staging area and wait for further instructions.”
“Something local?” McCarter asked, pulling a cigarette from the packet of Player’s in his shirt and lighting up. He pulled in the dark smoke with little satisfaction. Maybe they hadn’t gotten all of the slavers, and another nest of the vipers had been found. That’s fine by me. Let’s end this filthy practice, once and forever, he thought.
“Nothing local. We’ve got hot soup with breakage,” Price said tersely. “Coffeemaker will relay details over a more secure line.”
Coffeemaker had to be Kurtzman. “What kind of breakage?” McCarter asked, getting a bad feeling.
“Not over an open transmission.”
That made McCarter raise an eyebrow. Open? These radios were protected by 254-byte encoding! The situation had to be really bad.
“Confirm,” he stated, exhaling a long stream of smoke. “You sending Sky King?”
There was a crackle of background static. “Negative. Look for a man in dark clothing.”
A blacksuit from the Farm would be bring them a plane, the leader of Phoenix Force translated. “Understood. We’ll be ready. Over.”
“Over and out,” Price repeated, and the radio went silent.
Dropping the cigarette to the floor, McCarter crushed it under a boot, then went to inform the rest of the team. Their long night was over, but it sounded like an even longer day was just beginning.
CHAPTER FOUR
North Atlantic Ocean
The waves were low and sluggish, the thick waters of the Atlantic shimmering with the glassine effect of the nearly frozen brine. Peeking out from behind a few scattered clouds, the sun was high in the sky, but the light gave little warmth to the chilly world.
Standing on the bow of the HMS Harlow, the young boson swept the horizon with a large digital camera, his finger pressed lightly on the start button as if it were the trigger of an assault rifle. Standing closeby were the captain and the first officer, looking through computer-augmented binoculars.
“Anything?” the captain asked, an unlit cigarette jutting from a corner of his mouth.
“Nothing yet, sir,” the first officer replied. “Boson?”
“Same here, Skipper,” the man replied, swaying slightly to the motion of the deck as the missile frigate cut through the cold waters.
“Well, stay sharp!” the captain shouted above the wind. “It’ll be any second now, and we won’t get a second chance!”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
The salty wind was brisk, the sailors’ uniforms slowly becoming damp as the material snapped against their arms and legs. High above them on the bridge were the gray half domes of the radar pods, and behind the bulletproof Lexan plastic windows could be seen more officers and crewmen with field glasses, monoculars, digital cameras and old-fashioned 16 mm chemical cameras, the boxy Nikons equipped with telephoto lens. This was going to be a historic day for Her Majesty’s navy, hopefully, and every detail needed to be recorded.
“Look there, sir!” the first officer called excitedly, pointing starboard. “North by northwest!”
The captain replied with a grunt, but swung around to face the new direction, his hands tight on the binoculars.
Obediently, the boson followed their example. Through the electronic viewfinder, the sailor looked closely for any signs of submarine activity. The British navy was holding a live-fire test today of their new weapon, some thing called the Firelance. Unofficially, the rocket-powered torpedo had already been nicknamed by the sailors of the Harlow as the Thunder-fish.
Which was pretty accurate considering what the bloody thing could do, the boson thought, leaning harder against the safety railing to stop from swaying.
Removed from its regular duties, the Harlow was now on patrol outside the coastal wars of the Isle of Man, thought by some to be the most lonely spot in the North Atlantic that the UK still deemed to recognize as a royal possession. Just a lot of bare rock islands, hardly bigger than cricket field, and a million seagulls.
However, the royal missile frigate was not here to participate in the test, but assigned merely to be an observer. This was to be a battle of the titans, so to speak, and a vital stage in developing an adequate defense for the crown against this Russian aquatic killer. The British-made Firelance was going up against a Russian Squall purchased illegally on the black market by MI-5. Good lads all, the boson thought. Hopefully, the new British weapon could take out the Russian monster. Back during the cold war, the Soviet Union had invented the Squall, and the Iranians had their own version of the Russian superweapon. Sadly, the British navy was lagging behind in third place with the Yanks breathing hot on their necks. The boson smirked in pleasure. At least the French didn’t have them yet, thank Jesus. That was some comfort, anyway.
The Firelance was incredible, with a maximum speed of 350 kilometers per hour. The captain had been forced to play the instructional video several times for the startled crew before they got over the shock of seeing anything move that fast under water. The torpedoes had a powerful rocket engine instead of propellers at the end, and a flat, armored crown, which seemed to be the secret to its success. The torpedo looked about as streamlined as a truck, and needed to be hard-fired into the water, not merely released like a regular torpedo. But when the Firelance hit the ocean, the impact caused a momentary shock wave effect that created yawning cavitation on the armored crown. In effect the concussion pushed aside the seawater for a split second, leaving behind a small empty space that was almost a vacuum. The Firelance flew through the shock wave, in a vacuum of its own creation. A Squall could blow any surface ship out of the water before the crew even knew it was under attack.
An abrupt disturbance in the pattern of the waves caught the attention of everybody. Excited voices rose from the bridge. This was it! Then a humpback whale broke the surface for a moment to grab a breath and dived out of sight again.
Lowering the camera to clean the lens of spray, the boson hoped the big creature got the hell out of the engagement zone. Somewhere out there were two Royal Navy Vanguard submarines, and when the war games commenced, this was not going to be a safe place for innocent bystanders. Any minute now, the whale was going to find itself in more danger than a tourist in Liverpool.
There was subtle movement below the surface, the waves canting in different directions for only a heartbeat. Just long enough for the boson to catch sight of a periscope descending below the waves. Gotcha!
“Sub at four o’clock, sir!” the boson called out, tightening his grip on the video camera. Softly, the machine began to hum. “Range, one thousand meters!”
As the officers spun around, something flashed past the Harlow just below the surface. The blur was visible for a split second, then was gone.