Act Of War

CHAPTER THREE

The Isle of Sardinia

It was a moonless night and the stars were bright in the heavens. Sitting on a rock, the man in loose clothing was cleaning his fingernails with a pocketknife when he went stiff, his eyes going wide in shock. His hands twitched from the effort to grab the AK-47 assault rifle laying across his lap, but they refused to obey even the most simple command.

There was pain, searing pain, at the back of his head, and the guard realized that he had been stabbed in Death’s Doorway, the tiny fissure located near the right ear. Slide in a thin blade right there and your victim was paralyzed, twist the blade and they died instantly, like turning off a light switch. Click, dead. The guard had done it many times over the years to policemen, judges, even a few women who had refused to cooperate, but he never knew how much it hurt. The pain filled his body like electric fire. It was beyond agony! But he couldn’t make a sound. Not a sound.

Then there was pressure from the blade, a flash of light and eternal blackness.

With a soft exhalation, the dead man slid off the rock onto the white sandy beach, the assault rifle splashing into the blue sea.

“One down, fifty to go,” T. J. Hawkins whispered, wiping the blade clean before sheathing it. A decorated member of the elite Delta Force before joining Stony Man, Thomas Jackson Hawkins, T.J. to his family and friends, was a big man, lightning-fast in his movements and a stone-cold killer on the battlefield.

“Firebird One, this is Texas. The clubhouse is open,” Hawkins said, touching his throat mike.

As silent as ghosts, more men rose from the scraggly juniper bushes of the low hillock and approached the rocky rill, moving from shadow to shadow. Past the hillock rose huge sand dunes that extended for miles. This section of Sardinia was often called the Sarah of Italy. Others called it purgatory, the gateway to hell.

Carefully studying the coastline, David McCarter kept the Barnett crossbow steady in his grip, the blackened tip of the arrow as reflectionless as the sky above. A quiver of arrows for the crossbow was strapped across his back and a MP-5 machine gun was slung at his side, the barrel tipped with a sound suppressor.

There was a tunnel straight ahead of the Stony Man team, a dark recess going straight into the bowels of the earth. Sardinia was famous for its gold mines, the island honeycombed with a warren of passages. But McCarter knew this abandoned mine was a dead end. The slavers were a lot smarter than that. They had been plying their trade for decades, and nobody had ever gotten closer than the length of a knife blade before.

Until this night, McCarter thought grimly. A former member of the SAS, David McCarter was the leader of Phoenix Force, a former SAS commando and an Olympic-class pistol shot. Every man on the team owed his life to McCarter a dozen times over, and had repaid the debt in equal numbers. Their bonds of friendship had been forged in fields of blood.

On the surface, the island of Sardinia was a tourist’s paradise, the fjords filled with more yachts and pleasure craft than all of the fishing boats of the entire chain of twenty-three islands combined. The beaches were made of the purest white sand, as pristine as newly fallen snow, and the sea was almost supernaturally clear. During the daylight, it was possible to look all the way to the bottom of the shoals and see the wrecked stone columns from the time of the Roman Empire.

However, the criminal elements of Sardinia began to kidnap young women from Italy, Albania, Greece, Turkey, Spain and Sicily, hauling them away to a secret location. There they were brutalized until their spirits finally broke and they learned to accept their new position as sex slaves. Branded like cattle, the girls, mostly teenagers, were sold on the world sex market to high-priced whorehouses in Bangkok, harems in Arabia and South America or to millionaire sadists seeking fresh victims for their private torture rooms. If the girls refused to obey, or tried to escape, they were brutally killed.

Italy lost an estimated thousand teenage girls a year to the monstrous slavers. Numerous ships had been caught at sea, and occasionally some girls were rescued alive. But the slavers disliked witnesses, and often tossed them overboard still locked in their heavy steel chains.

If the flesh merchants were arrested by NATO forces, they went to stand trail in the world court. If taken by the Italian military, the slavers were executed at sea with a bullet to the back of the head. Nobody had ever accused the Italians of being soft on crime. But the lure of huge profits was too strong an incentive, and in spite of everything the UN, Interpol, Italy, Greece and Turkey could do, the foul practice continued.

There were few villages along Costa Verde that afforded privacy to anybody who did not wish to be observed. Far out to sea, Arlentu Mountain was a basalt fortress rising on the horizon from the last volcanic eruption hundreds of years ago. It was a landmark for passing ships to find the safe deep-water harbors. The mountain was also an excellent way for the slavers to navigate without using radar or radio beacons, which might give away their position.

Pulling a palm-size computer from a pocket of his combat suit, McCarter checked the position on the blinking red dot. The slavers were smart, he’d give the bastards that, but not smart enough. A raiding party had captured a water-skiing party that morning, and one of the guests was the daughter of a American senator, with a low-jack chip embedded into her earlobe. It was a precaution that some politicians and the members of their families, took against kidnapping. The chip had been steadily emitting a pulse, giving her exact location. Unfortunately, her father had been in conference until noon and only learned of her disappearance then. The senator immediately called the President, who then called Stony Man. Hours later Phoenix Force was moving through the night, tracking a tiny blip that hopefully still was attached to a living woman.

“There are no proximity sensors in the area,” Rafael Encizo said, checking the EM scanner in his hand. “We’re clear to proceed.”

Encizo was a short stocky man, with catlike reflexes. Slung across his chest was an MP-5 machine gun, and stun grenades festooned his web harness. A compact .38 Walther PPK rode in a high belly holster, a Tanto combat knife was sheathed upside down near his shoulder for fast access and plastic garrotes dangled from a breakaway catch on his belt.

“Are we heading for that?” Calvin James asked suspiciously, his accent pure southside Chicago. “Jails make a good cover for covert ops. Nobody wants to go near them, and any trouble can be attributed to an attempted escape.”

Rising far to the south, the black outline of a Sardinia penitentiary stood against the starry sky, a stoic reminder that not everybody on the island was involved in the black market of selling human beings. Like everywhere else, most of the people were just trying to make a living and protect their families. But not all.

“Trail goes this way,” McCarter said, checking the locator.

“Just hope we’re tracking a girl and not merely an ear,” Gary Manning stated, working the slide on a KGB Special pistol.

Satchel charges hung from both sides of his combat suit, while a standard-issue MP-5 submachine gun was slung across his chest. Usually, he carried a .50-caliber sniper Barrett rifle, whose titanic cigar-size bullets could shoot through a brick wall. But that was for open terrain, and the work tonight was going to be close quarters, probably hand to hand. Which is why he was also carrying disposable plastic garrotes, stun grenades and the KG-B Special.

Actually, the automatic pistol was simply a Beretta 9 mm with an oversize ejector port to prevent jamming. But the bullets were truly unique. Invented long ago by the KGB, the shells carried half-charges that propelled a miniature piston forward inside the casing to slap the soft-lead bullet forward. However, the 9 mm piston then jammed into the narrow 7 mm mouth of the casing virtually welding into place from the heat and friction. That stopped all of the propellant gases from escaping, along with any noise. The KGB Special wasn’t a silenced gun, but carried silenced bullets. The only sounds made were the click of the falling hammer and the click of the piston. The subsonic rounds had a pitiful range and poor penetration. But for this kind of a soft probe, where silence was vital, it was pure death, especially in the talented hands of Gary Manning.

Suddenly soft bells began to tinkle, and the Stony Man commandos dropped into combat posture, snicking off the safeties of their weapons. A moment later a deer strolled into view from around a boulder, its leather collar studded with tiny bells.

“A pet?” Encizo asked, easing his finger off the trigger of his submachine gun.

“No, the island is full of them,” James replied, checking behind them in case this was a diversion. “They roam free by the thousands, like reindeer in Iceland.”

As the deer began to walk along the sandy beach, Hawkins gave a hard grin. “Which is why there are no remote sensors. They’d be going off every five minutes with these things wandering around.”

“All the better for us,” McCarter said, comparing the vector graphic on the device to the terrain around them. “Okay, this way. I’m on point, T.J. and Gary cover the flanks. One meter spread, silenced weapons only.” First and foremost, this was a rescue mission. Get the girls out alive. Afterward, there could be a reckoning with the slavers, but not before. The image of the criminals throwing their “goods” overboard flashed into his mind, and a rage filled the former British soldier. He checked the arming bolt on his MP-5 submachine gun.

Easing through the jumbled array of boulders dotting the landscape, Phoenix Force slipped through the moonless night, watching for sentries and trip wires. There were sure to be additional safeguards aside from the one sleepy guard.

The salty smell of the sea became sweetened by the perfume of the maccia shrubs and myrtle. The team jerked their weapons upward at an odd noise, then relaxed when it was only a vulture winging by overhead. They only hoped it wasn’t an omen.

Following a dried riverbed of smooth stones, the Stony Man team soon reached a big granite tower set alongside a low hill, partially hiding it from the beach. All around them rose granite cliffs, impossible to climb. It was a box canyon, with the stony riverbed the only entrance.

“Mine,” Hawkins whispered into his throat mike.

Everybody froze.

Dropping to one knee, Hawkins moved aside the loose stones to reveal a squat land mine. Only the burnished pressure plate had been exposed, a small coin set among the loose stones. Pulling a garrote from his belt, Hawkins cinched it tight through the locking safety and heard the mine disarm. The weight trigger had been set to maximum, probably so that one of the wandering deer wouldn’t set the charge, but an escaping girl would have her legs blown off. Nasty.

A few yards away McCarter whistled softly, and bent to neutralize another. Then Encizo did a third, followed by James. Proceeding with extreme care, the team cleared a wide path down the middle of the riverbed until finally reaching an ancient Roman pavilion. Marble stairs rose from the riverbed and led directly to a large stone tower, which dominated the box canyon.

Spreading out, the Stony Man commandos checked for traps, but reached the crumbling fortress without incident.

Apparently, the granite tower had once been a tourist attraction, as there was a sign announcing the prices for a guided tour. But now the entrance was blocked. A weathered sign printed in Italian, Sardinian, French and Japanese listed the structure as dangerously unstable, about to collapse at any moment. The message was clear: keep out or die.

“Bullshit,” James muttered, holstering his pistol and running a scan of the door. He found no electronic sensors and went to work on the lock. A moment later they heard a subdued click and the door swung aside, revealing only darkness.

Donning their night-vision goggles, the team switched from starlite to UV and slipped into the ruin. The night vanished, replaced with a black-and-white view of the world in sharp detail.

The inside of the granite tower had been reinforced with concrete plastered on the walls. Rubber mats lined the ancient stones, and winding stairs led to the tower and down to the basement. Checking their weapons, Phoenix Force descended into the bowels of history.

The center of the stone steps was worn from two thousand years of bare feet, sandals, boots and sneakers. Small recessed niches dotted the wall. Most of them were empty, but a few contained modern Coleman lanterns. Reaching a landing, McCarter saw a short, plump statue of a naked woman sitting in a niche, the smiling figure holding a spear and a sheath of wheat. That was the mother goddess, protector of women and children. The Briton felt repulsed at the thought of the crying prisoners dragged past the ancient idol as some sort of horrible joke. Or was it more than that?

Going to the statue, McCarter switched from UV to infrared. Sure enough, the navel of the plump little goddess glowed faintly. Still warm from the touch of a human hand. Gently, the Stony Man commando inserted a finger into the navel and felt the stone give slightly.

Across the landing, there was a click and a section of the smooth concrete wall separated. Also switching to infrared, Hawkins inspected the door and pressed a palm to the only glowing area. There was a second click and the door swung aside, revealing a long narrow tunnel cut through the rock of the hill.

His weapon at the ready, Hawkins took the point position again and moved swiftly into the passageway, holding his pistol in a two-handed grip.

The last to enter, James pulled out a small block of C-4 from the satchel charge, shoved in a radio detonator and hid the explosive wad alongside the secret door. Just in case.

Exiting the tunnel, Hawkins found a huge room carved into the rock. Wooden pallets were placed in orderly lines along opposite walls and large cisterns stood in the corners.

“This was the barracks for the soldiers,” McCarter stated, glancing around. The place was enormous, suitable for a small army. He spotted small brass placards on the walls showing where racks for spears and swords used to be located. Now there were only rough outlines left by the smoke of primitive candles.

“Some sort of a museum exhibit,” Manning observed warily. There was no concrete down here. The walls were raw stone, covered with a ripple pattern of chisel marks from the artisans who had hammered the room into existence two thousand years ago.