Unified Action

CHAPTER THREE

With a bemused expression Hermann Schwarz watched the Saberliner take off. Beside him Blancanales was engaged in a rapid-fire exchange with an airport official while Carl Lyons stood off a short distance, big arms folded over a massive chest, scowl firmly in place.

The Dominican Republic had the feel of a hell zone, Schwarz reflected. He’d seen plenty of Third World trouble spots in his time, first with the military and then with Stony Man. The air was thick with humidity, heavy with equatorial-influenced heat. The smell of smoke from structure fires floated on the air with a greasy, acrid stench that was impossible to mistake.

He could hear the sounds of people rioting just blocks from his location, the dull roar punctuated by shrill staccato of police and emergency vehicle sirens. Occasionally there was the bark of firearms, sometimes even the sharp boom of a gasoline tank going up. The city was still reeling from two hurricanes that had blown ashore this season alone. Political corruption had only delayed and diluted the response. Private aid companies such as UNICEF and the Red Cross had been forced to use UN peacekeepers to deliver food and medicine. Some organizations had even been forced to hire private military companies to ensure delivery to areas deemed too hostile for UN security platoons.

Sometimes the Dominican military helped; sometimes they exacerbated the problems. Likewise with the police, the government bureaucrats and even the street warlords.

Schwarz snorted himself out of his reflection with sardonic cynicism. A flying cockroach the size of a Ping-Pong ball buzzed his head. He turned away and spit onto the concrete.

“Hot,” he said.

Lyons nodded. “Sun’s going down,” the Able Team leader said. Both men were waiting to see if Rosario “Politician” Blancanales would successfully work his special brand of magic on the airport official. If not, things were going to get increasingly difficult. “You make the crew at the gate?” Lyons asked.

Schwarz nodded without turning around. “Sure. Port authority patrolmen. M-16s and maybe a two-way radio.”

The customs force was parked at an employee access gate about fifty yards from where Able Team stood next to an upgraded Quonset hut hangar. Three police officers with a sergeant of the guard had parked a white soft-top Land Rover next to the chain-link gate.

The men ran to a type, tall and whipcord-lean with very dark skin. Their weapons were held casually and their uniforms, loose British-style tan jungle khakis, were reasonably maintained. Just beyond them a long asphalt road ran along a boulder-and-ballast dike across a swampy stretch of land before entering a rundown neighborhood.

Schwarz gestured with his chin toward the urban buildup beyond the garbage-strewed marsh before slapping at a mosquito on his neck. “You wanna take the back road?”

“Seems wise,” Lyons agreed. “We go out the front gate into the shopping district, we’re only going to run into more patrols and checkpoints.”

“Gangs are going to run the neighborhoods. Might be just as bad,” Schwarz pointed out.

“Gangs won’t cause as much trouble in the long run,” Lyons countered. “With the dead bodies and all,” he added.

Schwarz smirked. “Thanks for clearing that up. For a moment I thought you meant they’d be able to trace all the bibles we’d be handing out back to the Farm.”

Lyons ignored him, turned back toward the gate. His eyes narrowed as he sized the men up. “I’d rather bribe ’em,” he admitted.

“The safehouse’ll have operational funds but for now we’re fresh off the plane. We either get out of this gate or we fail. It’s one or the other.”

“Don’t I know,” Lyons said. “I just hope Hal’s contacts will pull through.”

“Maybe if the government wasn’t under siege…” Schwarz trailed off.

“I guess if I don’t like it I can always go back to being a cop.” Lyons turned his head and spit on a beetle longer than his thumb as it scurried by on the concrete. The air was so damp from the humidity he felt as if he was being water boarded.

“Our target is out there,” Schwarz reminded him. “I kinda doubt they’re going to let us just track him down. I got long odds on us getting our ticket out that gate.”

Lyons nodded. He lifted one fist the size of a canned ham and squeezed it with his other hand. The knuckles popped like gunshots. “There’s an American in trouble,” the ex–LAPD detective said. “Bad day to be a Dominican customs cop.”

“Have you seen this place?” Schwarz grunted. “Every day is a bad day for those poor sons of bitches.”

Blancanales nodded, then thanked the minor bureaucrat he was addressing. The man walked away and Blancanales came toward them. He looked jaunty and upbeat as he approached, but that was just the man’s basic personality. Lyons knew before the stocky Puerto Rican said anything that it was a wash.

“Did Barb call us?” Blancanales asked without preamble.

“No updates, no frag orders, no reprieves,” Schwarz answered. “We either give here or roll out that gate, brother.”

“Oh, we’re going out that gate,” Lyons said.

Kyrgyzstan

0430 am local time

THE ISOSCELES-TRIANGLE-shaped delta aircraft streaked across central Asian airspace. Four pulse detonation engines hammered the flying wedge forward at Mach 5. Normally staffed with two flight officers, one pilot and one reconnaissance officer, the converted aircraft was piloted by Stony Man ace Jack Grimaldi, who flew solo on this mission.

Cameras, sensors, remote imagers and central processing units had been removed and the body retrofitted to provide a drop platform for airborne insertion. In the dark, claustrophobic hold Phoenix Force waited, attached to oxygen until the GPS system alerted them to their proximity to the jump zone.

A tiny red light blinked once, then shifted to amber. Inside the transport chamber the five commandos felt the airframe shudder under the stress of declining speed. The oxygen system was pumping pure oxygen into the Phoenix Force operators, flushing nitrogen from their blood systems in preparation for the drop to offset hypoxia complications.

On the instrument panel the jump light clicked over from amber to green. Grimaldi reached out and flipped the toggle switch, activating the hydraulic ramp. Within seconds the team was gone into the central Asian night.

The five black figures were invisible against the dark backdrop of the night sky. Unit commander David McCarter, himself a jumpmaster from the elite British Special Air Service, kept a close eye on the plunging members of his team.

Using his altimeter as a guide, McCarter gave the signal to disengage from supplemental oxygen. The air that high above the black-and-gray checkerboard of the landscape was chill as the commandos breathed it in.

At the predetermined altitude McCarter gave the signal and the loose circle of paratroopers broke away, turning into corkscrew spiral led by the British soldier. The black silk parachute of combat diver Rafael Encizo billowed up and popped open to begin the deployment sequence.

The four other members of Phoenix dropped past the paragliding Cuban-American and in quick succession ex–Navy SEAL Calvin James, then Canadian special forces veteran Gary Manning pulled their ripcords. McCarter and T. J. Hawkins dropped below the rest before the Texan and former Delta Force operator deployed his own parachute.

McCarter turned in his free fall and yanked his own ripcord. His chute unfurled and snapped open, jerking him up short. Arrayed behind and above him the team continued its descent in a long, staggered but symmetrical line.

McCarter led the paragliding procession using his wrist-mounted GPS unit to guide the team down to a narrow plateau on a ridge of low, sparsely wooded hills set above a road.

He used his time under the canopy to do a last-minute reconnaissance of the area as he dropped. Off to the northeast he was able to clearly distinguish a long line of headlights coming from the northwest. He felt a certain grim satisfaction as he realized his prey was heading directly toward the guns of his team.

He flared the chute as he touched down, then absorbed the impact up through the soles of his old Russian army boots. McCarter, like the rest of Phoenix Force, was dressed in a motley collection of drab, local civilian garb and Soviet-era Russian army uniform items. Their weapons were Russian, their faces covered in beards, and their equipment from explosives to communications and medical items were common black market items available in the arms bazaars of Armenian criminal syndicates.

Moving quickly, McCarter turned and began collecting his chute, rolling it into a tight ball as the rest of his men landed around him. Hawkins quickly unzipped an SVD sniper rifle from its cushioned carryall and powered up the illumination optics on the night scope.

As the other three members began to cache the drop gear, Hawkins went to the edge of the windswept gravel landing zone to pull security while McCarter worked his scrambled communications uplink.

“Phoenix Actual to Stony Farm,” he barked.

“Go for Stony,” Price replied immediately.

“We’re on the ground and initiating movement to target,” McCarter informed the woman.

“Good copy,” Price acknowledged. “We have eyes on,” she assured the field commander.

Above their heads the Stony Man’s own Keyhole satellite had spun into geosynchronous orbit and the NASA cameras began focusing tightly on the broken terrain with a lens capability so powerful it could read the license plate of a speeding vehicle at night. The ghostly white figures of Phoenix Force appeared on Price’s heads-up display back in the Virginia command and control center.

On the stark, exposed finger of the central Asian topography McCarter turned as his team cached the last of their jump gear and began to assemble and ready their primary weapons. Besides Hawkins and his SVD sniper rifle, the massive, thickly muscled frame of Gary Manning was adorned with a 7.62 mm RPK machine gun. The short fire-plug profile of Rafael Encizo came up behind the Canadian, a Type 50 submachine gun his hands. The compact weapon was a prolific Chinese knock-off of the Soviet-era PPSh-41 SMG, and Encizo used it to supplement the RPG-7 launcher he carried along with a sling of HE rockets.

Calvin James was the second half of Phoenix Force’s rocket team. He was also armed with an RPG-7 and Type 50. For his part David McCarter would be using a cut-down AKS-74 outfitted with a black market M-203 40 mm grenade launcher.

“We’re ready to roll,” Manning informed McCarter.

McCarter nodded, then spoke into his uplink. “How we looking out there, Hawk?”

“All clear on the approach route,” he answered.

“Copy. Bound forward one hundred yards into overwatch and will move into position.”

“Hawk out.”

“Let’s go,” McCarter ordered.

The four-man assault squad fell into a loose Ranger file with McCarter leading and Manning with his machine gun bringing up the rear. For McCarter the movement to target held a surreal quality. The stark, denuded geography seemed like a moonscape through the filtering lens of their commercial night-vision goggles. Each footfall sent puffs of pale dust billowing up, and there was the constant companion of high-altitude wind.

Around them the bare tops of hills rising from a lightly wooded river valley sat like a twisting barrier to the grasslands just beyond, stretching all the way toward the Chinese border.

Moving quickly, the team linked up with Hawkins and moved into position above a narrow switchback in an ancient dirt road carved out decades ago through the low mountains. McCarter called a halt and the team took three minutes to drink water from their canteens.

Once again Hawkins with his telescopic lens was dispatched to the periphery of the formation to provide security as the other four members of Phoenix Force prepped the assault site. Wooden-handled Soviet entrenching tools quickly hacked narrow holes into the side of the earth. Belay pinions were shoved in and buried, forming dead man hangs that allowed the team to deploy their rappel ropes.

“I’ve got the scout vehicle at the bottom of the canyon,” Hawkins said, breaking radio silence.

McCarter narrowed his eyes and turned his ear into the chill bite of the wind. On the air he could clearly make out the throaty growls of heavy engines climbing a steep grade in low gear. “Copy,” he told Hawkins. Turning back toward his teammates, he gave terse directions. “We have initial eyes on. Snap into ropes and ready weapons.”

Without comment all four commandos snapped their ropes into the D-ring carabiners of their rappel harnesses. Once locked into their drop rigs, Calvin James and Rafael Encizo quickly laid out several warheads and primed their RPGs. Beside them Gary Manning methodically dropped down the folding legs on his machine gun’s bipod and settled into position on the flank of the hit squad, poised to pour 7.62 mm rounds down the steep incline and onto the road below.

There was a harsh metallic click as he racked the bolt and chambered the first round on his belt. “Terrorist surprise package hot,” he declared in a soft self-satisfied voice.

McCarter grunted in response and slid home a high-explosive 40 mm grenade into his M-203 launcher. Once he was locked and loaded he pulled his Combat Personal Data Assistant out from a Cordura and Kevlar pouch. The CPDA had a commercial housing that on initial inspection hid the electronic upgrades provided by Stony Man’s technical section.

McCarter turned his head away from the bite of the omnipresent and icy breeze, bringing his finger up to key his mic. “Stony, you have eyes over target?”

“Affirmative,” Price replied.

“Send signal to my hand unit for final confirmation,” McCarter instructed.

Having given his instructions, McCarter held up the CPDA and opened the screen to the digital feed. So far every aspect of their intelligence had been correct, but he wanted to have absolute confirmation that he wasn’t accidentally taking down a civilian caravan before he turned Phoenix Force loose on the line of vehicles below.

On his screen the satellite feed appeared, the line of vehicles appearing as white outlines against the cold dark of the Kyrgyzstan geography. The hoods of the trucks glowed slightly from the reflected heat of the hardworking engines and the headlights flashed in hard shards of illuminations. With all the reflected light McCarter was able to clearly pick out the six vehicles of the convoy.

Two commercial four-wheel-drive pickups ran at the front of the vehicle line, followed by three Russian army five-ton trucks with canvas sheaths over the rear storage compartments. The final big truck was uncovered, leaving the several men of the gun crew exposed. Four men in loose turban-style headgear manned a 20 mm antiaircraft gun.

McCarter felt like purring as he clicked his push-to-talk button on the com uplink. “I have visual confirmation of target,” he told Stony Man.

“You are cleared to engage,” Barbara Price informed him.

CHAPTER FOUR

Dominican Republic

Able Team was a direct-action unit that identified its targets and went forward until enemy combatants had been neutralized in one fashion or another. Capable of stealth and subterfuge, the team was a trio of extremely fit, extremely confident special operators used to sizing up all manner of opposition—soldiers, police, criminals and spies. It wasn’t hard to identify the hard-eyed Carl Lyons and more laconic features of Rosario Blancanales and Hermann Schwarz as experienced ass kickers.

The sun was low in the sky, radiating heat like a flamethrower, and the humidity was so thick it felt like a hanging curtain as Able Team approached the customs police in a loose triangle with Lyons at the front.

Recognizing the potential for trouble, the four guards dropped hands to the grips of weapons and stiffened their posture. The leader of the group, an extremely dark-skinned islander with a seemingly fleshless skull, threw a half-smoked cigarette to the ground and let it smolder.

As the three Stony Man operatives approached, Blancanales and Schwarz drifted out a few steps to the side, turning their approach wedge in a softly enveloping semicircle that kept the bodies of the customs officers trapped between themselves and the frame of their vehicle.

Sensing trouble but seeing no weapons, the officer took a step forward and opened his mouth to bark an order.

Lyons lifted up a meaty fist and snapped it forward down his center line in an old-school karate punch. The first two knuckles of his fist slammed into the custom officer’s chin, his jaw hanging loose as he prepared to speak. The hinge joint where the jawbone joined the skull was rammed backward, mauling the nerves centered there. The officer went down like a pole-axed steer in a Chicago stockyard, instantly unconscious.

Hermann Schwarz moved in close to his target, his limbs tracing predetermined combative patterns. His left hand slapped the barrel of his man’s weapon to one side, his right hand snapping once in a short jab to the man’s solar plexus that doubled him over, followed by a hook that took the man flush along his temple and dropped him instantly.

On the opposite side of Lyons from Schwarz, ex–Special Forces soldier Rosario Blancanales hammered into his own opponent. The Puerto Rican commando slammed his left hand against the forestock of the man’s rifle, pushing it hard into the startled Dominican’s chest and trapping it against the torso.

Caught by surprise, the man’s first instinct was to clutch his weapon even more tightly, slowing his response to the attack. Immediately, Blancanales snapped the edge of his right hand into the side of the Dominican’s neck, striking the officer along his carotid sinus. The man’s eyes rolled upward until only whites showed and he crumpled to the ground at his feet.

The final officer had time to swing a clumsy over-hand buttstroke toward Lyons, who deflected it with the palm of his hand before catching the overmatched soldier on the angle of his chin with a powerful boxer’s hook that dropped him.

“Let’s go,” Lyons snapped, jumping to work.

Quickly they used the downed men’s own handcuffs to secure them before stripping weapons, a cell phone, vehicle ignition keys and an ancient Motorola handheld walkie-talkie from the checkpoint officers.

“Do you think three white dudes in a government-marked jeep will be suspicious?” Schwarz asked, voice wry, as he fired up the vehicle.

“Speak for yourself, Mr. White Guy,” Blancanales said as he jumped in the back seat and pushed the police weapons out of obvious sight.

“Just try to look official until we can get a different ride,” Lyons said.

Schwarz pushed the accelerator down and gunned the jeep down the asphalt service road running behind the airport and toward Santo Domingo. Beside him Lyons was using thick fingers to triangulate a GPS-guided route on the screen of his CPDA.

Ahead of them a line of aluminum-and-clapboard shanties formed a labyrinthine barrier on the outskirts of the town. Beyond this ramshackle slum in the more built-up areas of the city, columns of brown-and-black smoke rose and the wail of sirens could be easily picked out, punctuated by the sharp reports of gunfire. Forming a backdrop to this was an audible sound of the rioting mobs forming a sort of human white noise that underlined and overlaid everything else.

Santo Domingo was a city on fire.

Working on his navigational program, Lyons snarled in disgust and shoved the CPDA away. “The damn thing only wants to give me obvious thoroughfare,” he explained, voice terse with frustration. “We roll down main avenues and we’re going to hit crowds and riot police every fifty fucking yards.”

“Oh, now you don’t want to be obvious?” Blancanales called out from the back seat.

Schwarz reached the end of the service lane and swerved off onto a side road to avoid running into any official traffic working checkpoints or coming from the opposite direction.

He swerved to avoid a stray dog and ran the vehicle through a rut into a long shallow puddle of polluted ditch water. They entered a winding street of the shanty slum and were immediately forced to slow because of the people milling around. Though not rioting, this group of citizens was clearly anxious about the situation and crowded the sides of the street.

A sea of dark faces turned in surprise toward the three men in the jeep. Dogs barked as bystanders pointed with open curiosity at the sight. Other vehicles, freight trucks, minibikes and taxis, began to clog the road, slowing Schwarz’s speed.

Lyons mulled over his situation as Schwarz expertly guided the vehicle through the narrow twisting lanes. Groups of young males, some openly carrying machetes, began to appear on street corners.

“We’ve still got five miles to go to the docks,” Blancanales pointed out. “We’re going to be playing Russian roulette in a couple of minutes once we get into the industrial and merchant areas,” Blancanales continued. “I don’t mind putting a couple of this regime’s bully boys to sleep to get a ride, but I don’t think a gun battle is going to be productive.”

“I’m open to suggestions,” Lyons said, hooded eyes watching the crowds and vehicles for any sign of a threat.