Deadly Payload

“Even more bad news,” Encizo noted as he lowered his scope-equipped MP-5. “That barge didn’t go more than five hundred yards out into the water.”

McCarter glanced back, then watched the trailers. He swept them with his binoculars, eschewing optics for his machine pistol. He lowered them. “They set up a transmission antenna.”

James looked out toward the barge. “We only saw them unload one of the trailers onto the barge, with workers who had come out of the back of a second.”

“The third is a control center,” Hawkins said. He took a deep breath and lifted his binoculars to watch the barge along with James and Encizo. “It’s parked?”

“Looks like they’re setting up to launch the UAVs,” James noted.

“Get on the horn to the Farm,” McCarter said. “We’ve got a major emergency. Rafe, Cal. Time to hit the water.”

Encizo grimaced. “Both of us?”

“I appreciate the offer, but that barge has to be put down before they can launch,” McCarter ordered.

Hawkins looked up from his satellite phone. “Got the Farm.”

“Barb?” McCarter asked.

“What is it, David?” Barbara Price asked.

“Have the Israeli air force go on alert. We’ve stumbled on another bit of provocation,” he told her. “That barge is a floating launch pad.”

“Should we get someone scrambled out to you?” Price asked.

“Syria is on full alert as it is. Any friendly aircraft who’d hit this place would only provoke them and their allies in Lebanon,” the Briton explained.

“What kind of enemy forces are you looking at?” Price continued.

“Thirty to forty ground troops. Lord know how many in the trucks, but a group went out on the barge,” McCarter explained.

Price covered the mouthpiece on her end for a moment, then spoke to McCarter again. “An air strike might make Damascus squirrelly, but we have a way around that.”

“What’ve you got?” McCarter inquired.

“An artillery unit in northern Israel. They lob some explosives across the border into Lebanon every so often,” Price mentioned.

McCarter frowned. “We’re danger close, and I’d like to take one of the trailers intact. If we can get hold of the hardware and servers used to operate their drones, we could slip you chaps into the back door for some deep-down digging.”

“Ten to one’s tough odds, David,” Price said.

“Worse than that,” McCarter admitted. “I sent Cal and Rafe to the barge to sink it.”

“We drop one shell in the vicinity. It’ll cut the odds, and less likely to blow everything to hell.”

The Briton handed the phone to Hawkins and contacted James and Encizo on his Los Angeles SWAT Headset—LASH. “How soon to the barge?”

“Another two minutes,” Encizo said.

McCarter took the phone back from Hawkins. “How far is the artillery site from here?”

Price gave the coordinates.

“A minute and a half flight,” McCarter figured.

“That’s what we figured. Coordinates?” Price asked.

McCarter handed the phone to Manning, who had been observing the operation. The Canadian read off coordinates he figured through his map skills. Manning’s mathematical skills and navigational abilities were second to none, and if anyone had a chance to spot for an artillery shell fired from dozens of miles away without benefits of laser targeting, it was him. Manning gave the Briton the phone.

“Your artillery is on its way,” Price promised. “It’ll be there by the time the others make their move on the barge.”

“What can we expect?” McCarter asked.

“We have a reserve unit dropping some payback on a Palestinian group. You’ll get a 155 mm Copperhead from a Doher,” Price said.

“Cover your heads, lads. It’s going to get loud,” McCarter promised.

Manning slung his sniper rifle and drew his Glock 34. He’d eschewed a machine pistol for the precision rifle, but compromised by carrying two of the chosen sidearm for this mission. The second Glock was set up for close-quarters combat, equipped with a blunt four-inch suppressor, a 20-round extended magazine and, on a rail under the barrel, a mounted gun light. The suppressor provided a semblance of stealth without sacrificing stopping power for the hollowpoint rounds within, and the light, even if it wasn’t activated, served as a means of steadying the already mild recoil of the G-34 in rapid fire. The Glock was also one of the most accurate and easy-to-shoot handguns on the planet, second only to McCarter’s own beloved Browning Hi-Power.

McCarter relegated his MP-5 to a backup role, drawing his Browning in anticipation of a fast, nasty mop-up. And it would be quick and nasty. While an artillery shell would take out a good number of the enemy force, no barrage would ever completely obliterate opposition. But it would soften them up. Hawkins stuck with his MP-5, not trusting his skill with a handgun to be as high as Phoenix veterans Manning and McCarter.

The Briton looked out over the water.

The two minutes that James and Encizo had estimated were almost up.

K NIFING THROUGH THE WATER like they were born to it, Rafael Encizo and Calvin James closed on the barge. The Phoenix Force pair drew their fighting knives in anticipation of first contact with the crew of the barge, but their observations showed that the men on board were busy preparing unmanned aerial vehicles for launch. Just before they reached the hull, they noted canisters labeled with the universal symbol for biohazard.

Encizo and James shared a nervous, knowing glance as they realized the implications of their failure. Whoever these men were, they were planning to launch an attack, utilizing a similar lethal contamination that devastated the Syrian camp. Four UAVs sat on the deck of the barge, laden with four canisters each on underwing mounts normally meant for Maverick antitank missiles. The size of the containers promised a potential of death for thousands if they struck in a metropolitan center.

Both Phoenix force commandos realized that Israel had many port cities that would provide tempting targets for the airborne death-bringers.

On the shore, a thunderclap split the air, which served as the starting gun for their assault.

Encizo gripped the rail of the barge with one hand and hauled himself onto its deck, staying low. In his off hand, the Cold Steel Tanto Combat knife was held in an icepick grip, the chisel-pointed, razor-sharp blade shielded against his forearm so it wouldn’t reflect the work lights on the deck, even though he had the concealment of a crate. James surfaced and crawled onto the barge fifteen feet away, also behind a transport container. The barge itself was twenty yards long, but much narrower by a factor of four to one, five yards wide. It was a garbage scow that had been pressed into service as an aircraft carrier to launch the drones. Since the UAVs were designed for short takeoff and landing, even with underwing payloads, the length would be enough for the launching task.

The engines on the first one strummed to life and Encizo realized that if it started moving, tragedy would fall on an Israeli city. The stocky Cuban sheathed his combat blade and shouldered his machine pistol, quickly detaching the suppressor on the MP-5, knowing that he’d need every ounce of power to damage even the relatively flimsy and disposable aircraft.

He focused on the engine cowling, situated two feet above and away from the biohazard canisters mounted underwing, and opened fire as soon as he had a clear sight picture. The German-made machine pistol chattered out its popping death song. Men on deck dived for cover at the sound of Encizo’s attack, shocked at his sudden appearance. The engine cowling perforated in a dozen places as full-metal-jacketed bullets smashed through the pistons running its propeller.

The Predator knockoff lurched forward a few feet, smoke pouring from the damaged engine, but it rolled to a halt as the propeller caught and froze on broken pistons.

James moved from behind cover as soon as Encizo opened fire and concentrated on two of the enemy who were reaching for their weapons. All the men on the barge were armed with at least handguns, and the two who were reacting had AKM folding-stock assault rifles. James ripped a burst of suppressed fire into one of them, stitching him through the face and shoulders. The other man had gotten to his knees and fired a quick salvo from the hip that missed the black Phoenix Force pro by inches. James tucked down deeper and sliced the rifleman from crotch to throat with a half dozen Parabellum slugs. The enemy gunner flopped over the side of the barge, disappearing into the Mediterranean.

Encizo scurried behind the cover of his crates, keeping one step ahead of the handgun fire that chased him. The Cuban took a few potshots, but was hampered by the fact that four drones were parked on the deck laden with poison-packed containers. He didn’t want to risk dumping contagion into the Mediterranean to have it wash ashore in a populated area.

Saving one city would have been a waste if other civilians were sacrificed because of sloppy work. He still fired a few shots, high and wide, to keep their attention on him and give James, who had a better angle on the defenders, a chance to take them out.

James didn’t envy Encizo’s position as human target, and he ripped off more bursts from his machine pistol, tagging every enemy target he could find. Unfortunately the enemy had realized that as long as they cowered behind the biohazard containers, they were relatively safe.

James disabused them of that concept by dropping prone and targeting legs and feet with his machine pistol. Bullets smashed violently through tarsal bones and kneecaps with equally devastating and crippling results. The conspirators crashed helplessly to the deck, falling away from the lethal cylinders of contagion that they sought to use as shields. Flat on their backs and bellies, they were easy targets for James and Encizo to finish off.

The Cuban crouched behind a crate and swept fallen survivors with submachine-gun fire. It was a cruel and callous effort, gunning down the injured, but these men still held handguns that they could use in a last-ditch effort to breach one of the bioweapon containers as a final act of revenge.

“All clear?” James asked, moving swiftly around the bodies of the dead and the inert drones.

“No movement,” Encizo answered.

“We can’t leave these things,” James stated, looking toward the shore.

“No,” Encizo agreed, “but we can take them with us.”

James looked at the deckhouse. “I’ve got it.”

“Maybe we won’t be too late to help out,” Encizo concluded as the barge turned toward the shore.

I T WAS NO DIFFICULT TRICK to misdirect a laser-guided 155 mm artillery shell utilizing a broadcast pulse from a satellite slaved to Stony Man Farm’s control. The M-712 Copperhead was one of the first and most successful of laser-guided, cannon-launched munitions, with a range of ten miles, and carrying nearly fifteen pounds of Composition B as its warhead. With a velocity of detonation at 8050 meters per second, 1100 meters per second faster than TNT, the Copperhead shell possessed awesome destructive ability. Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman distracted the single Copperhead round from a flight of twenty aimed across the northern border between Israel and Lebanon against a Syrian-backed militia. Well within the ten-mile range of the laser-guided shell, the M-712 altered its guide path and split off from the main flight.

Kurtzman continued to track their hijacked shell in flight, painting Manning’s target via a satellite-mounted laser. The computer genius took into account atmospheric refraction, but he held his breath as the warhead, loaded with the equivalent of fifteen pounds of TNT, was dropped, as McCarter had noted, “danger close” to the men of Phoenix Force. One variation in humidity or air temperature and there was a strong possibility that there wouldn’t be enough left of McCarter, Manning and Hawkins to scoop up inside a matchbox.

The satellite registered the detonation of the Copperhead, and Kurtzman looked at his screen for the IFF codes on Phoenix Force’s LASH communicators.

They were still in operation, unmoved by the concussive eruption of the deadly warhead. However, even as the dust cloud rose and thickened over the battle scene, obscuring the reconnaissance satellite’s visual coverage of the battle scene, McCarter’s, Manning’s and Hawkins’s signals burst into motion toward the convoy of conspirators.

“Good luck,” Kurtzman whispered.

W HEN 138 POUNDS OF LASER-GUIDED missile landed, even if only fifteen pounds of it was made of high explosives, it made an impression.

The impact and detonation kicked up a wind that blew harshly over the heads of McCarter and his partners. The convoy itself was rocked as riflemen standing guard in the open and their pickups were lifted and hurled by a concussion wave that traveled at 26,000 feet per second. The tractor-trailer rigs shook mightily, but their enormous bulk had protected them from being flung around like children’s toys. A column of dust and smoke rose from the impact crater, and bodies were strewed about. A pickup that had been two yards from the Copperhead’s landing point was compressed as if it were an empty beer can, and rolled toward the beach. Other trucks were simply flipped to varying degrees.

While some of the drivers inside might have survived, McCarter felt confident that those inside the crushed pickup kicked toward the Mediterranean like a gigantic metal beach ball were instantly dead. Rushing from behind cover with his sound-suppressed Browning in fist, McCarter was first into action. Manning and Hawkins were only heartbeats behind him, their own weapons at the ready.

The Phoenix Force commander charged toward the remnants of the convoy. A stunned rifleman jerked to his hands and knees, wagging his head to shake out the cobwebs. McCarter, not needing to have an armed soldier at his back, cleared those cobwebs away with a fast double-tap of Para bellum rounds, coring the gunner’s skull. Hawkins and Manning sighted other potential enemies, ripping suppressed fire into them before they could return to their senses and form a defense of their Predator ground-control operation. It was fast and brutal butcher’s work, but considering that the odds against them could still be twenty against three, there was no doubts slowing the three professional warriors.

The closer to the blast crater they got, the less movement they encountered, though McCarter paused for a half step at the sight of one survivor. A soldier guarding the convoy gasped, holding the almost skeletal remains of his right arm out to the Briton. The Arab’s face was a sticky red mess and his jaw worked up and down, unintelligible sounds waiting through shredded lips. McCarter hammered three shots into the ghastly figure, ending the man’s suffering as he continued in his hard charge toward the trailer that Manning had identified as the main control center.

Here, the guards had managed to recover much more quickly, even if they did sway uneasily on their feet, senses reeling from the hammer blow dropped by an angry god into their laps. McCarter dropped to one knee and pivoted like a human turret, his Browning sweeping enemy heads, trigger breaking like a glass rod every time his front sight crossed a body. At six shots a second, he wasn’t going to approximate the rate of fire of a submachine gun, but each round went exactly where McCarter needed it to go, faces exploding as 9 mm bullets smashed into them with blinding speed.

With eight shots dead on target in a shade over a second, McCarter rose from his kneeling position and continued his rush. In the heartbeat between kneeling and accelerating to a full run, he automatically replenished the partially emptied Browning with a new 13-round magazine.

Manning and Hawkins raked the flanking survivors among the guard force with their own weapons, giving McCarter the freedom to continue toward the operations control trailer. He was three feet from the top of the steps at the back of it when the door slammed open, a dazed, bloodied technician staggering into view. The Briton lashed out with his left hand, grabbing a fistful of the man’s shirt and shoving him back into the control center, the Browning in his right chugging two shots through the technician’s heart. The flap holster on the man’s hip might only have been for show, but he was armed and was going to send a weapon-laden flight of drones to attack an Israeli city. Cored through the heart, the technician was now a lifeless shield of flesh and bone as the Briton heaved him through the doorway.

Someone inside had some presence of mind and cut loose with a Makarov pistol, but the low-powered 9 mm bullets couldn’t penetrate the dead man McCarter held in front of him. Most of the lights inside the trailer had been knocked out, only one bulb illuminating the far end, though liquid crystal display screens threw a soft but dim blue glow over the interior. Shaken technicians struggled to get out of the way of the Phoenix Force commander’s stampede through their quarters. The Briton tapped off three shots at the gunman who’d drilled his own dead comrade. One shot was a miss, but the second and third shots were as straight as a line of rivets, cutting two gory holes in the shooter’s throat. Head nearly severed, the armed technician flopped across his computer table, keyboard and liquid crystal monitor crashing to the floor of the trailer.

A drone operator lunged at McCarter from behind, his arms spread wide to grab the wily fox-faced Briton. Instead of catching him in a bear hug, the technician caught the point of McCarter’s elbow in his solar plexus with bone-breaking force. Suddenly unable to breathe, the man collapsed to his knees, giving McCarter a moment of freedom to shove his corpse shield into a second feisty drone operator who tried to swing his chair as a club. Both men’s bodies collapsed to the floor, McCarter pinning the chair-wielding technician down forever with two rounds from his Browning.

The choking operator reached out, trying to grab McCarter again, and this time the Stony Man commando whirled and snapped his heel into the conspirator’s nose, crushing it flat and driving the bone into his brain. Four down, he thought, looking around the shadowy trailer, scanning for more opponents. He’d almost completed a full circle of his search when two Makarov bullets stung his armored load-bearing vest. The enemy gunman had some training, and that saved the former SAS commando, since most people concentrate on the center of mass when shooting. McCarter’s center was protected by Kevlar and polymer mesh chain link calibrated to stop a .44 Magnum or AK-47 bullet. Lightning reflexes spurred the Phoenix Force leader to return fire, zipping five shots into the gunman from crotch to sternum.

Opened up like a gutted calf, the last drone operator fell to his knees, folding over his spilling entrails and dying.

“Report in,” McCarter called over his com-link.

The others reported “all clear.”

“T.J., bring the sat phone in here and hook these control computers up to the Farm,” the Briton ordered.

He looked around the trailer, at the five bodies. The death toll for this mission was sure to climb. And given that even the technicians were willing to fight to the death, this conflict was going to be brutal.

McCarter took a deep breath and reloaded his partially spent Browning.

“So what else is bloody new?” he asked tiredly, holstering his pistol.

CHAPTER THREE

The Mercedes SUV bounced raggedly over the muddy trail through the Darien. A mountainous rain forest that formed an almost impenetrable border between Panama and Colombia, the Darien was a formidable force. Even though northern Colombia received constant radar scanning from various drug-enforcement agencies, the inland jungles and rugged mountains of the land bridge formed between the two nations provided innumerable hiding places for people not wishing to be found. Uninhabited, hot and rainy the area also could befuddle an army of people searching for fugitives. While building a base within these territories would be extremely difficult, a curtain of inhospitable jungle and choppy, hill-broken terrain provided a hard-to-penetrate barrier.

“But that barrier is useless against flying machines like an unmanned aerial vehicle,” Schwarz said.

The SUV’s front right tire dipped into another pothole that hurled the members of Able Team and Susana Arquillo around like rag dolls. Carl Lyons held on tightly, fighting to maintain control of the 4WD vehicle as the terrain threatened to hammer them insensate with the passenger compartment of the SUV.

Lyons glanced over at Arquillo. She clutched the sides of her seat to absorb most of the frantic thrashing, but even so, her pert, sleek little bosom jostled with each rut slam.

“Are you aiming for these potholes, Mr. Ryder?” Arquillo snapped. “Because if you are, just pull over and I’ll do five minutes of jumping jacks for you and then you can drive sanely.”

Lyons’s attention had already returned to the road.

“You’ve driven in this mess before,” he growled. “You know these roads suck.”

“Besides, you’re not Ironman’s type,” Blancanales said. “You can count to ten without using your fingers.”

Lyons grunted in annoyance, weaving between two huge puddles. They were already soaked to the skin, as the humidity in the jungle was a stifling blanket, even without raining. They’d also hit one inescapable puddle that was three feet deep and stretched along ten feet of road. The interior of the vehicle was soaked with brown, brackish water as there was no way that they would drive the SUV with its doors attached. The roof, however, had a canvas canopy that prevented them from being brained by low-hanging branches. The fabric covering, however, breathed enough to keep the three men and their female companion from suffocating in the vehicle.

“How’re we doing on the navigation?” Lyons asked as they neared the coordinates where Arquillo’s informants had sighted UFOs.

Schwarz looked at his heavy-duty PDA. A GPS map on its screen was laid over a real-time photographic image of the countryside, satellite imagery transmitted from Stony Man Farm to give Able Team every bit of information they needed on the go. The PDA itself was made with solid-state electronics and encased in a tough metallic shell. The screen was made from quarter-inch thick Lexan over a liquid crystal display. The keypad was a touch-sensitive pad under a fireproof Nomex screen with numbers and letters installed. The clear Lexan screen didn’t interfere with the “touch screen” controls, which could be operated with any pointed object, from a dagger point to a pencil or stick scrounged from the environment. Schwarz knew that a stylus was easy to lose, having been a tech geek who’d lost several dozen expensive and inexpensive models for far less durable pocket data assistants.

“Another five minutes on…Hit the brakes!” Schwarz snapped. The Mercedes SUV screeched to a halt, its front end plowing into another pond-size puddle that sprawled across the road. Schwarz wiped muddy water off his screen and squinted. He tapped the screen with a pencil, increasing magnification. “We’ve got company.”

Lyons pushed the SUV into a lower gear and powered out of the puddle, crushing through thick foliage at the roadside. He kept going, weaving between tree trunks until the canopy of the forest gave them concealment.

Able Team and Arquillo left the vehicle, grabbing their combat packs and weapons as they did so. All four of them carried SIG 551 assault rifles. Chosen for a durable, mud-and grit-proof AK-47-style action, but with the ability to utilize American 5.56 mm ammunition and M-16 magazines, the SIGs had fourteen-inch barrels, light and compact enough for jungle or close quarters fighting, but still with enough power and reach for long-range engagements. Lyons’s version had a cut-down Remington 870 shotgun “Masterkey” modification attached under his barrel. A small 5-shot 12-gauge allowed the Able Team leader some versatility in breaking the back of an enemy ambush with buckshot, or punching holes through stubborn locks as a breeching weapon. Normally, the Masterkey system was limited to rifles that could mount the M-203 grenade launcher, and the SIG rifles were designed to carry Heckler & Koch grenade launchers, a completely different form of bracket. However, since Blancanales didn’t want to give up the M-203 grenade launcher he favored, and demanded for his SIG 551, Stony Man’s master gunsmith John “Cowboy” Kissinger redesigned the M-203 mounting sleeve for the short-barreled SIG’s forearm. The shotgun and the grenade launcher modifications to the assault carbines gave the team a force multiplier and the ability to destroy enemy vehicles or defensive positions with several ounces of high-explosive power. All four carried heavyweight 77-grain match-grade hollowpoint ammunition to make up for the 5.56 mm round’s loss of velocity out of the 14-inch barrel of the SIGs.