Splintered Sky

Another 40 mm grenade sizzled through the sky, and Lyons glanced back to Blancanales and Schwarz.

The electronics genius had recovered his senses, but Blancanales had instinctively hooked his arm under Schwarz’s and yanked him along. Lyons bellowed, equalizing the pressure in his ears as he stuffed himself into the bottom of a gully beside the goat path.

The darkened desert shook with a thunderbolt strike, and Lyons could feel his load-bearing vest ripple as the concussion burst swept across him. Blancanales’s grenade launcher burped again while Schwarz’s own DSA-58 carbine snarled a vengeful response. This time, the Puerto Rican Able Team veteran popped off an M379-A1 Airburst grenade. Instead of providing a miniature sun dangling from a parachute, the Airburst shell looped into an arc, landed on the ground and a black powder charge propelled the main grenade five feet into the air before its fuse wound down to detonation. At a height of five feet off the ground, the Airburst exploded, spraying out a sheet of lethal shrapnel that would kill anything within a sixteen-foot radius of the blast, but still could wound as far out as four hundred feet.

A wailing scream of pain as shrapnel tore through body armor and fragile flash and bone beneath provided the testimony to its effectiveness. Lyons spotted the gunman who had dodged his initial burst, clutching his shredded face and neck. He’d lost his weapon when Blancanales’s shrapnel had scythed across him, and Lyons was about to put a few mercy rounds into the gunman when Schwarz nailed him.

“Can you run?” Lyons asked over the headset.

“Yeah,” Schwarz replied. “The concussion wave only knocked the wind out of me.”

“We’ve lost the element of surprise.” Blancanales spoke up, pointing to the flare as it sputtered through the last of its forty-second lifespan, burning down to a lifeless ember that flopped under its parachute on the ground. “That baby was seen for miles.”

“I saw their truck,” Lyons told him. “It did its job. Gadgets…”

“I’ll get Jack on station,” Schwarz returned.

The trio raced across the desert, wary that they might not have finished off all of their opponents.

Charging up the goat path to the SUV took only another half minute. Lyons paused at roadside for a heartbeat to pop off a single round into a sprawled corpse to ensure it would never rise again. He noted with grim humor that Schwarz had been the one to nail the enemy gunman wielding the grenade launcher.

The enemy’s SUV had a guard with a compact machine pistol. The man rushed to get back behind the wheel of his vehicle, firing across the hood, but Lyons and Blancanales stitched him with twin bursts of autofire. Blown nearly out of his boots, the guard’s corpse flopped in a boneless mass, door wide open.

Blancanales checked the dead man and peeled the night-vision goggles off his face.

“Keys are in the ignition,” Lyons announced, crawling into the SUV’s shotgun seat.

“Good,” the Able Team commando replied. He slipped behind the wheel, fired up the engine and spun out.

Schwarz was in the back, picking up the FLIR camera feed from Grimaldi’s helicopter, correlating the image with his GPS data. “They’re looping around, going for a second run at the border. They’re either certain their boys did the job, or they’re going to come in hot and heavy.”

“I’m not going to wait to see what their response is,” Lyons said. He wedged his Mossberg shotgun into the seat well and rolled down the window, providing himself with room to shoot his carbine with its stock folded. “Nut up and do it.”

“It’s worked this long,” Schwarz agreed.

Blancanales nodded. He could see the beacons on the enemy convoy blink out, their headlights flaring to life in an effort to blind him, but they were so far away, and the wily Able Team expert was so familiar with low-light operations, he avoided any discomfort. Turning his head to observe the cast-off infrared illumination instead of staring into the “invisible” light sources directly with his NVGs, he was able to keep his course to intercept the enemy trucks.

Lyons had traded his carbine with Blancanales and stuffed an M-433 HEDP shell into its grenade launcher. The SUV jostled him, rocking hard in an effort to throw his aim off, but Lyons had earned the name Ironman due to his phenomenal strength. He’d braced himself in the passenger seat, pointed at a raider’s SUV and touched off the grenade. The high-explosive, dual-purpose shell spiraled toward the enemy vehicle at 350 feet per second, smashing into the grille of the onrushing Jeep. The M-433 exploded, a spit-back assembly built into the shell focusing a blistering-hot jet of molten copper, propelled by several ounces of A5 explosive through the engine block and into the cab of the SUV. The raiders’ driver and shotgun man were killed as the dashboard, speared by liquid metal and high explosives, turned to a mass of jagged, burning fragments that tore through their chests, legs and faces. Driverless, the enemy Jeep swerved into a rut and somersaulted in the air before it could bleed off speed. The men in the back seat, merely wounded by the cone of deadly shrapnel that used to be their ride, screamed for a moment before the airborne SUV slammed, roof-first into the Texas desert. The SUV had been designed to handle roll-overs, but no maker could have predicted their vehicle would be lifted up and hurled at the ground like a toy. The survivors’ screams cut off instantly as their bodies were compressed to ground beef under three-quarters of a ton of off-roading metal.

The remaining three escorts for the big trucks swung out, gunners ripping off streams of autofire. Schwarz had targeted one of the Suburbans as they swung parallel to Able Team for a moment, his hammering carbine carving a bloody swathe through the open windows that the enemy gunners fired from. The vehicle that Schwarz raked swung wildly off course, a lifeless body flopping half in and out of the window he’d used as a turret. Schwarz, a veteran of countless gun battles inside of a vehicle, had known to tuck himself low, using the window-reinforced door as his shield, rather than expose his head and shoulders in an effort to utilize the opening as a turret.

Blancanales swung the front of Able Team’s captured Suburban on an intercept course for a second of the raiders’ vehicles, giving the wheel a jerk at the last moment to stab the corner of the front fender into the rear wheel of the passing enemy. The fender deformed on Able Team’s ride, but the rear axle of the hostile Suburban snapped like a twig under the force of the SUV hammering into it. The mysterious marauders wailed in dismay as their truck spiraled through the desert, back wheels flying off.

“Last one’s keeping its distance,” Lyons noted. “I’m only getting glancing shots on it. Their driver’s good.”

“Forget him for now,” Blancanales snapped. “We’ve got the main trucks to deal with.”

Lyons glanced back at the pair of trucks. They were two-and-a-half-ton M35 trucks, and they were lumbering toward the goat path as fast as they could roll, taking advantage of the distraction provided by their escorts. The Able Team leader sneered and pushed home another M-433, then remembered the possibility that the marauders had taken captives.

Rather than risk noncombatants, he pulled his Mossberg Cruiser 500. The Brenneke slug load would be devastating in close quarters, and not as risky as buckshot to bystanders. “Swing up close on the lead truck. If we can stop it while we’ve taken up the roadside…”

“Good plan,” Blancanales agreed, and he gunned the engine, zooming past the second transport truck. Schwarz scanned the back, but could only see black-clad troopers in the shadows of the canvas tarp.

Blancanales swerved between the two big M35s, putting the passenger side in close contact with the tailgate of the lead vehicle. Lyons threw open the door and launched himself from the shotgun seat, his Mossberg gripped tightly in his right fist. His beefy left hand wrapped around the top of the tailgate, and he hauled himself up as his partners veered away. Swinging over into the tarp-covered bed, he spotted a quartet of gun-toting men surrounding a pair of crates. In the corner, a coverall-wearing man, his head bleeding from blunt trauma, curled up.

Lyons evaluated the scene in half the time it took for the gunmen to react to his bulk surging over the top of the tailgate. The Knox pistol-grip Comp Stock gave the Able Team leader all the leverage he needed to swing up the Mossberg Cruiser 500 like a handgun and fire a single 12-gauge slug through the chest of the closest gunman. A .72-inch missile ripped through the raider’s breastbone, reducing it to free-floating splinters as the solid hunk of lead tore his heart from its arteries like a miniature bulldozer.

Lyons immediately shifted his aim and stabbed the next of the armor-clad raiders in the breastbone with the point of his Cruiser 500. Since Lyons had John “Cowboy” Kissinger modify the muzzle of the weapon with a Tromix Shark Brake Door Breacher, and, given his awesome strength, the shotgun became a spike-toothed spear that made ribs crunch even through body armor. The hapless enemy grabbed the shotgun instinctively, bracing the slide. Lyons thanked his opponent for playing into his hands by quickly wrenching the Cruiser 500 back and forth, his foe’s grasp enabling him to pump the shotgun one-handed. A second solid 12-gauge slug exploded from the muzzle, tearing into the bruised sternum of the marauder and exploding out of his spine. The shooter behind him was bobbing and weaving, trying to get an angle on the burly killing machine attached to the tailgate when the Brenneke slug sliced across his biceps and glanced across his ribs.

This time, the gunman’s body armor protected him, if only because the deadly slug had been slowed down by the armor and torso of another person. The impact still threw the guy off balance and he let go of his grip on his rifle, one hand tearing through the canvas cover in an attempt to get an anchor to remain standing. Unfortunately for the raider, the force needed to tear through the tarpaulin had shattered several of his fingers, and with only one digit to maintain a hold, the next jolt of the truck sent him reeling across the crates in the middle of the bed.

Lyons’s legs and support arm surged with power and he hurled himself over the tailgate. He somersaulted to cushion his landing on the bed where the injured raider had fallen. As the enemy shooter struggled to bring up his rifle singlehanded, Lyons foiled his efforts at self-defense by spiking both of his heels down into the murderous marauder’s chest. Aching ribs snapped under the ferocious power of the Able Team leader’s devastating kicks, and the gunman’s mouth became a crimson volcano of burbling blood and bile.

Lyons took the opportunity to rack the action of his Mossberg with his now free left hand, just in time to see the head of the last of the hostiles in the truck poke up.

“Don’t do it!” the raider shouted. “I’ll kill—”

Lyons pulled the trigger on the shooter before he could even complete, let alone make good on his threat to shoot the cowering figure in coveralls sharing the carnal pit. One and three-eighths ounces of rifled lead struck the loudmouth between his eyes and popped his skull like a balloon filled with gray gelatin. It was a vicious, ruthless action, but the Able Team leader knew that the black-clad gunman wouldn’t have worried about shooting either Lyons or the helpless hostage. He got to his feet and moved over to the bloody-faced man in the corner, clicking on a pocket flashlight to get some intel on who the victim was.

“Who are you?” the balding hostage asked. Just beneath his high hairline was an oval-shaped section of livid skin. Lyons recognized the injury as caused by the steel tubular butt stock of an M-4 assault rifle, just like the black-clad gunmen were wearing. He gripped the man by the chin and checked his eyes.

The pupils dilated as the flashlight’s glare stabbed into them, so the head trauma was only superficial, torn skin seeping blood from a glancing impact. Lyons was glad for that, because he wasn’t in the best position to deal with a victim suffering from a major concussion or slipping into shock.

“I’m a friend,” Lyons answered. “Stay here and curl up. We’re going to make certain you are safe.”

“Where are you going?” the man, Leon Paczesny according to his Burgundy Lake Testing Facility identification badge, asked.

“Truck’s still moving. I’m going to schedule a stop to let you off,” Lyons told him. He returned the Mossberg to its sheath on his back and pulled the Smith & Wesson MP-40 from its holster. “Sit tight, literally.”

Paczesny nodded, tucking his knees up to his chest and resting his bloodied forehead between them. Lyons unsheathed his combat knife and sliced an exit hole through the canvas. He climbed through the tarp and grabbed onto the back of the cab.

Able Team’s captured Chevy Suburban was at Lyons’s side, Schwarz firing his DSA carbine through the back window of the armored raider vehicle at the two remaining enemy SUVs which were struggling to keep up with the racing convoy. Lyons grimaced as he heard the rip-snap of the FAL’s high-velocity rifle bullets spearing through the darkness. By now, all pretense of stealth had disappeared, and the Burgundy Lake raiders had switched on conventional headlights. Lyons stiff-armed his MP-40 and fired a volley as fast as he could work the trigger, six 165-grain jacketed hollowpoint rounds striking the windshield behind a pair of enemy headlights. The Able Team commander focused his fire on the Suburbans, not certain if the other truck had a hostage, as well.

Safety glass deformed and whitened under Lyons’s barrage, shocking the driver into slamming on the brakes. The second Chevy flashed forward to take up the slack, but its hood smoked, pouring out thick clouds from where its shattered radiator and shot-up V-8 burned. The fact that the Suburban continued to rattle onward to keep up with the rolling battle despite a magazine of .30-caliber bullets in it was testament the truck’s engineering. Unfortunately, no amount of SUV design excellence could have provided the raiders with protection from a 40 mm buckshot grenade.

Firing the equivalent of three 12-gauge shotgun shells’ worth of number 4 buck, the M-576 turned Blancanales’s M-203 into a supershotgun. At maximum dispersal, the M-203 could put out a cone of death almost one hundred feet wide. At the range between Schwarz in the back of Able Team’s Suburban to the enemy vehicle, the spread only ensured that a seven-foot diameter hose of death collapsed the windshield and perforated the surviving gunmen in the Jeep.

The smoldering vehicle rolled on, glancing off the fender of the second M-35 cargo truck before rebounding into a ditch. As tortured steel collapsed under its own inertia, gasoline squeezed out of severed fuel lines and turned into a blossom of fire licking into the night sky.

Lyons returned his attention to the cab, only to see the shotgun rider of the lead two-and-a-half-ton truck climbing out the passenger door, a Glock in hand. Lyons swept the MP-40 back toward him and triggered a pair of slugs. The bouncing truck was too much for Lyons to maintain his aim, so the bullets went high and to the right. Only one wide-mouthed round clipped the enemy gunman’s shoulder, gouging a deep laceration through the muscle. The impact was still enough to throw the raider’s aim off, his Glock punching holes through the roof of the cab. A sudden spray of blood darkened the driver window, and the M-36 cargo truck lurched violently. Lyons tightened his grasp on the iron rib holding up the tarp, and though his feet left the thin ledge he was using as a running board, he wasn’t thrown from the vehicle.

“Hang on!” Lyons bellowed to Paczesny. “We’re going to crash!”

The truck swerved off the road and Lyons twisted, hurling his Smith & Wesson into the bed and using both hands to haul him through the tear in the canvas. He tucked his legs up and behind him just as the two-and-a-half-ton truck lurched and skidded onto its side. The steel ribs held as Lyons flopped against the bottom of the seats. The packing crates shattered, spilling prototype motors onto the canvas where shredding tarpaulin snagged them and ground them to useless metal splinters under the cover’s ribbing.

Lyons looked around for Paczesny and saw the balding, bloody-headed man holding his Smith & Wesson.

“Had to go and fuck up everything didn’t you, Blondie?” Paczesny snarled, jabbing the pistol toward Lyons. The faux hostage took in a breath, but Lyons straightened his legs, using the bench he laid on as a launch pad, slamming into the gun-toting fake and knocking them both out the back of the sliding truck. The pair hit the ground, tumbling, MP-40 flying clear of stunned fingers as the second two-and-a-half-ton truck whirled past, missing them by inches.

Paczesny’s fists rained on the Able Team leader’s neck and shoulders in a futile attempt to dislodge Lyons. Without leverage, the blows were merely annoying, and Lyons whipped his forehead forward, striking the balding man’s nose at the bridge, hard enough to make him see stars under the impact without doing any fatal damage. Lyons needed this man for information. Grabbing Paczesny’s wrist, Lyons twisted. The pop of joints was accompanied by a wail of pain.

“Are there any hostages in the other truck?” Lyons bellowed.

“Piss off!” Paczesny answered.

Lyons twisted even harder, and he could see the knob of his prisoner’s ulna stretching the skin of his elbow. “Wrong answer. I’ll rip this fucking thing off and feed it to you if you don’t answer.”

“No. No. I was the only one with them,” Paczesny said.

“How’d you get the stock burn?” Lyons asked.

“Air Force guard gave me a whack in the head when I pulled a gun on him. My partners burned him down,” Paczesny said.

Confronted by the balding man’s betrayal, Lyons gave a hard final twist, then punched him in the temple. The blow rendered Paczesny unconscious, and Lyons secured his wrists and ankles with cable ties. “You two get that? No friendlies are on truck two. Free fire!”

“We’ve got it,” Schwarz answered. “Let me just take care of this.”

Hundreds of yards away, Schwarz fed another magazine into his DSA-58 tactical carbine and hammered off another burst through a pursuing Suburban. Finally, despite the unstable platform of his own ride and the uneven road, he was able to score a direct hit with the autorifle. Schwarz’s burst struck the enemy driver in the head and exploded his brains. The shotgun rider lunged, grabbing the wheel, but the vehicle fell back without any pressure on the gas.

Schwarz had an easier time aiming at the stilled SUV full of gunmen, burning off the rest of his 30-round magazine into the cab. One of the enemy raiders was leaning out the window, returning fire with his M-4 carbine, but his efforts were cut off by the Able Team genius’s slashing storm of high-velocity bullets. The vehicle was out of the play.

“Okay, the last of the escorts are done,” Schwarz called. “Wish you were here for this.”

“Just do it,” Lyons growled over the com link.

Schwarz fed another HEDP round into the M-203’s breech and aimed at the second M36. He pulled the trigger and the 40 mm armor-piercing round hit the grille and detonated. A small gust of flaming gases appeared around the nose of the cargo truck, a display of the impact point as the real light show went on inside of the engine compartment. The shaped charge liquefied the interior cone of copper and turned it into a flaming bullet that shredded the engine block. The twelve-cylinder motor disintegrated into a wave of shrapnel that obliterated the bellies and legs of the driver and the passenger, killing them instantly.

The vehicle skidded to a halt, kicking up dirt as it slid sideways. Blancanales hit the brakes, and the two Able Team commandos got out of the captured SUV using it as a shield.

“I’ve got movement,” Blancanales announced. He opened fire at a fleeing shadow, but the enemy figure was just too fast. He disappeared into the rough, broken face of a cliff. “Ironman, try to cut him off.”

“You’re too far down, and I don’t have a shot,” Lyons replied. “More movement at the back of your truck…”

Blancanales and Schwarz saw three black-clad marauders exit the rear of the truck, their weapons up and spitting fire, but the two Able Team operatives were ready for them. Their rifles vomited hot lead, dumping the hard men into the dirt.

Blananales returned to looking for the mystery shadow, launching another parachute flare, but the uneven ground had too many shadows, nooks and crannies for a determined fleeing opponent. The fact that he hadn’t returned fire was indicative that their foe was not interested in a fight.

“We’ll find him,” Schwarz promised. “Whoever set this up has something planned.”

Blancanales nodded as the parachute flare sputtered and burned out. In moments, it was as cold as the trail looked.

CHAPTER THREE

Yuma, Arizona

The aftermath of the border battle wasn’t the end of Able Team’s business. First, they had to stash Paczesny away in their safehouse. Since Grimaldi had the use of a small airfield that saw only moderate use, Lyons decided to keep him in a broom closet in the hangar that Stony Man Farm had reserved for them. Paczesny glared daggers, his mouth stuffed with a rag that was duct-taped in place. Anchoring the rag partially inside and outside of his mouth would keep him from aspirating the cloth and choking to death on it.

“We’ll talk to you when we’re rested,” Lyons said. He slapped pieces of duct tape across the prisoner’s eyes and set a pair of headphones on the man’s ears. The other end of the phones was plugged into an MP3 player that ran a twenty-minute loop of a digitally produced, low-pitched squeal. Completely blinded and deafened, the prisoner would be softened up by the time Able Team was ready to interrogate him.

The trio reported in to the Farm, giving what they knew and learning of a full-court Homeland Security press on investigating the brutal raid.

“We’ll put you on the roster to join in with the task force,” Barbara Price, Stony Man’s mission controller, told them. “You’ll be Justice Department agents.”

“Good,” Lyons said. “I’d like to get a quick look at the crime scene.”

“You’ll get as much as you want once daylight hits,” Price responded. “We’ll see what we’ve got on file about Leon Paczesny and do some forensic financial documentation on him. Whoever paid him to be the inside man at Burgundy Lake will have left a trail.”

“While Aaron and the gang play CSI Grand Cayman, don’t forget to have them let us in on parallel rocketry developments in the works,” Lyons added.

“You think this was a ploy to interrupt our ability to develop maneuvering thrusters that could compete with an enemy power?” Price asked.

“Wouldn’t be the first time we were in on something like this,” Lyons replied. “Does HS have an investigation team going to the border?”

“To pore over what’s left of the raider team that hit, yeah,” Price answered. “Fortunately, we do have the fingerprints and facials you sent us via digital camera.”

“Keep working on that. I don’t mind interagency cooperation, but HS tends to trip over its own dick when it comes to actually putting clues together,” Lyons grumbled. “We can toss them a few hints when we’re on the way home from wrecking the perps.”

“Trust me,” Price said. “You’ll be the first ones to know anything about this.”

“Good,” Lyons replied. “I’m going to get cleaned up and get some food in me. By the time I’m done, Paczesny will feel like he’s been in sensory deprivation for a whole day.”