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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.
Spare magazines were tucked into the pockets of their Safari vests, which concealed their handguns. The lightweight outer shell and multiple pockets also disguised the vests’ inner lining, a blend of lightweight chain mail and mesh-woven Kevlar capable of stopping a hunting rifle round cold. Coverage was incomplete, because the sleeveless designs were meant for hot weather, and nothing protected their heads, but the garments, dubbed by codesigners Schwarz and Kissinger as Hot LZ vests, provided enough of an edge to split the difference between attacking in full commando gear and blending in as civilians. Since the Panamanian public was leery of American troops, Able Team decided that low-profile “soft” civilian clothing was its best option.
Schwarz checked the screen on his PDA, live footage pouring in to inform him of the presence of two darts in the air. He pegged them as the Predator knockoffs. Only the sensitivity of the National Reconnaissance Office satellite feeding Stony Man its real time imagery made the patrolling drones visible against the jungle beneath. He pocketed the PDA and looked in the back of the SUV, making certain he left nothing behind.
“Shame, too. I liked this bucket,” Schwarz grumbled as he trotted to join the others away from the SUV.
“The road’s compromised somehow,” Lyons said. “But it sure didn’t look like any electronics could have survived in this environment.”
“No sensors,” Blancanales replied, “but there’s a possibility we might have been picked up by low-level radar. A tight beam wouldn’t show up on any detectors, not if it were scanning down into the hills instead of providing umbrella-style coverage.”
“More like a spotlight,” Lyons said. “It wouldn’t even be seen from space?”
“No. Not in a tight beam sweep,” Schwarz explained. “It was just blind luck that the drones I spotted on my map…”
They heard the thrum of motors fill the air. Softer and more subtle than conventional aircraft due to enclosed ducts, the Predators were designed to have a stealthy profile in their role as observation aircraft. Six shadows rocketed over a gap in the canopy overhead, speeding to the north.
“Six?” Schwarz wondered outloud, confused.
“How many did you see?” Lyons asked.
“Two…and they were a lot higher up,” the electronics genius answered.
Arquillo looked toward the Mercedes SUV, nestled in the shadows of the tall trees bracketing it. “Well, if they’ve passed already, it should be safe to get back in…”
The CIA agent’s musing was answered as a finger of smoke stabbed down through the treetops as quick as lightning. An explosion struck the SUV dead-center, splitting it into two burning halves that flopped away from each other like dying fish on dry land. The concussive blast rolled over Arquillo and pushed her to the ground.
Lyons grabbed her and hauled her to her feet. It took a few moments for her explosion-rattled senses to register that they were running, slicing through the rain forest as streams of machine-gun fire ripped down in their wake, lead, splintered branches and dislodged leaves falling in an unnatural storm behind them.
She shrugged loose from Lyons and kept up with Able Team’s frantic pace through the jungle, staying one step ahead of the sweeping scythes of automatic fire that lashed at their heels.
R OBERTO D A C OSTA DIDN’T BELIEVE in much. Though the majority of South America practiced Catholicism, or occasionally some other form of Christianity, DaCosta considered himself a fairly reasonable man, enlightened above the need for some invisible friend in the sky. Let the fools who worked under him throw their lot in with an imaginary father figure with magical powers, he thought. DaCosta made his own fortune and didn’t need any psychic crutches. Right now, overseeing the loading of an oil tanker with millions of gallons of petroleum, earmarked for the United States, the oil man realized what real power was. The Venezuelan had command over billions of dollars worth of product, and had the ability to deny substantial portions of another country the fuel they needed to warm their homes or to get to work in the morning.
DaCosta didn’t believe in much, but he believed in his godhood. At his whim, he could strangle the wheels of progress to a halt and cast nations into chaos. A smile crept across his sun-bronzed face, a corner of his mouth turning up. He wouldn’t really, but the thought shot him through with a jolt of adrenaline as powerful as any cocaine. In his role as supervisor at the Maracaibo petrochemical complex, he was paid handsomely, and had his share of mistresses for when he grew bored with his wife, or when the slowly aging slut was busy with some cabana boy or another. He’d even had occasion to enjoy a trip to Thailand, blowing a large bonus on some forbidden fruit.
He didn’t need to sweat under the sun, among the white buttons of oil storage containers spread out in rows along the Gulf of Venezuela, or get his hands greasy in operating pipes. Hundreds toiled under DaCosta’s leadership. Still, his bronzed flesh glinted in the noonday sun as he stood on a catwalk overlooking the oil transferral. His secretary could handle the paperwork, and any important phone calls would be routed through the cell phone hanging on his belt. DaCosta preferred to be outside, watching, paying attention to the domain that he ruled with unequaled power. He’d been, secretly, part of the two-month oil strike that had hit at the end of 2002, cajoled by an offer of several million dollars to hurt the government. That was when he realized his true godhood.
His cell warbled on his belt.
“What is it?” he asked, annoyed at the interruption of his dreams of grandeur.
“Sir, the coastal patrol spotted something a few minutes ago, passing Los Monjes,” his secretary told him.
DaCosta was about to dismiss it, but knew that Los Monjes islands were a point of contention between Venezuela and Colombia. “Smugglers? So? Colombia sends smugglers all the time around the Gulf.”
“Well, with the trouble in Panama with unmanned attack aircraft…” his secretary began.
“The coastal patrol can handle a few enemy airplanes, right?” DaCosta asked.
“They lost track of the unidentified aircraft.”
DaCosta felt a moment of weakness. From his position atop the catwalk, he could see north, along the bottleneck between Lago de Maracaibo and the Gulf of Venezuela for miles and miles. Needlepoints of white, five or six of them, were visible in the faint distance across the glassy waters of the now placid gulf.
The Venezuelan oil man swallowed hard as they wove around the stern of an oil tanker, moving with synchronized precision like a school of deadly fish.
Suddenly he realized that his godly power was a stack of cards that could be knocked down, and he watched the personification of the ill wind that was going to collapse it.
N ORMALLY, THE P REDATOR UAV drone was a low-powered, propeller-driven unmanned drone. It had been developed from early cruise missiles, the space normally reserved for a warhead payload replaced with advanced optics, transmitters and cameras. Unfortunately the cruise missiles, with their supersonic engines, were grossly inefficient at gathering intelligence, passing too quickly through an enemy territory. It was good for a first-glance of forces in a region, but commanders knew the benefits of real-time transmissions. Something slower, with longer staying power, was necessary. As such, the winglets were increased in width and area to allow more surface to catch air and glide, and the jet engine was replaced with a more fuel-efficient prop-driven motor. Now, crossing the sky at under two hundred miles an hour, the Predator was an ideal eye in the sky, able to hang around and orbit throughout an entire battle, or maintain a long-term watch on enemy movements across distances. The slow-moving Predators could also be equipped with weaponry that made them ideal assassination platforms, as proved in Afghanistan against al Qaeda forces.
The Engineers of the New Tomorrow, however, had brilliant designers on their side. Not only were the UAVs modified for multiple weapon platforms, such as machine guns, artillery rockets or even biochemical weapon payloads, but the ENT had developed a lightweight rocket engine that fit into the housing of the prop unit on their modified Predators. The additional wingspan helped stabilize the drones at near sonic speeds, and all that high-tech electronics were replaced.
In the case of the Maracaibo assault, the payload was a medium-size thermobaric warhead. While larger thermobarics were a step below a nuclear warhead, the modified Predators, reverse engineered back to being cruise missiles, were still devastating weapons. Originally, these particular warheads were meant for clearing underground installations such as those encountered in Afghanistan. Producing a cloud of airborne fuel, which was ignited to the same temperature as the surface of the sun, the fuel-air explosion had enormous power, capable of incinerating even the most persistent biological or chemical weapon.
Used against the armored white tanks dotting the shoreline, it was like a sledgehammer brought down on a row of candy buttons. The Predators spread out evenly, their blast radius a mere 500 meters, but more than enough to cover a large portion of the petrochemical complex. All six detonated simultaneously.
Roberto DaCosta, standing on his catwalk, was spared the raw fury of being caught in the cloud of vaporized fuel igniting across three kilometers of shoreline. The flash, however, was blindingly hot and his exposed skin was scourged with first-degree burns. A concussion wave of superheated air thrown off by the explosion slammed him against the railing of the catwalk hard enough to leave a hairline fracture along his pelvis and lower back, as well as deep tissue bruising. The combined pain made him collapse, his arms flailing for the support of the rail.
Instants later the wind returned, but in the opposite direction, pulling with the force of a tornado as the atmosphere fought to fill the momentary vacuum caused by six thermobaric warheads detonating in unison.
DaCosta howled in fear and terror, clinging to the railing for dear life. Below, he could see the complex’s workers being thrown around like rag dolls by concussion and implosion waves.
The winds finally stopped, but the heat grew worse. DaCosta looked back and realized that 1500 square kilometers of oil storage field was a blazing inferno, millions of gallons of petroleum fueling a fire that convinced him that hell truly did exist. The sky turned deep black as thick, choking smoke spread out, a smothering blanket that spread across the city of Maracaibo.
T HE DRONES WERE RELENTLESS in their pursuit of Able Team and Arquillo. While their brethren were en route to unleash relentless hell and fury on a defenseless city, moving at high subsonic velocities, the patrol Predators hung at a relatively lazy ninety miles an hour, long wings picking up the wind to provide lift beyond what their forward velocity supplied. Even so, their initial strafing runs had proved fruitless, simply because the only means that they had for picking up the fleeing humans was thermal imaging. In the hot and humid atmosphere of the rain forest, however, it was impossible to get a clean lock on the Stony Man warriors and their CIA ally. The SUV had proved to be an easy target, simply because its mass of metal and hot engine proved a much easier target for even tropic-hazed sensors.
Unfortunately the metal in their weaponry and equipment provided the tight-beam radar spotlight with a small means of tracking them. It was a tiny, low-profile signature, but still enough to give the operators of the drones something to lock on to.
Blancanales, his senses tuned by years of experience in jungles across the globe, found a cave and ushered the others into it. It was small, and a tight fit, but once inside, they were shielded not only from streams of light machine-gun fire, but also the probing radar beams that hunted them through the rain forest
Arquillo was crouched, hands on her khaki-clad knees, reddish hair damp and soaked, covering her face as she gulped down air to replenish herself from the frantic run. Lyons rested a hand on her shoulder and she glanced up at him. He offered her a canteen of water.
“Damn near got us killed suggesting we go back to the SUV,” she panted before taking a swig of tepid water. She swallowed, knowing that she needed the moisture.
“We’re alive,” Lyons told her. “No harm, no foul.”
Arquillo straightened and leaned her head against the cave wall. She dragged a curtain of sweat-dampened hair from in front of her eyes and looked over Able Team. “I still let my guard down too soon.”
“Well, it’s not like we can drive you back to a day-care center for CIA agents, can we?” Blancanales asked, winking. “Someone blew up our ride.”
Schwarz breathed slowly and deeply, willing his body’s autonomic reactions to subside so that he could concentrate on his PDA. Inside the cave, under a sheet of heavy rock in the side of a hill, he’d lost satellite contact. He switched the device over to transmission scanning and moved closer to the mouth of the cave.
“Isn’t he going to give our position away? One good shot with a rocket like before, and this cave becomes a tomb,” Arquillo said.
“Nah. I’m on passive scan, this unit has radar-absorbent paint over its metal, and I left my rifle with Pol,” Schwarz mentioned as he studied the screen.
“Checking to see if the spotlight is near us,” Arquillo concluded as she watched.
The electronics expert nodded. “See, they can sweep the hillside with relative impunity because it’s a tight beam. No radiation spills over to be noticed, even by sensors checking the area, unless they’re right in the arc of the beam.”
“Which the PDA is,” Lyons said. “You don’t pick them up, they can’t pick us up.”
Blancanales looked at Schwarz. “They’re still sweeping the area?”
“Yeah. And even if the spotlight is off us, those drones still have thermal sensors. It won’t be efficient, but after wasting so much ammo, they might just see what they could do with more rockets.”
The ground shook violently and Arquillo ducked. Dust rained from the roof of the cave, making her cough.
“See what I mean?” Schwarz asked, crouched near the mouth of the cave.
“We could just shoot them down,” Lyons growled.
Blancanales shrugged. “So then they’d send forces on foot after us.”
“I’d rather go one on one with enemy soldiers than cower from rocket strikes,” Lyons countered.
“Got a point there,” Arquillo agreed. The rumbling thunder of artillery rockets slamming into the hillside around them was unnerving and left her feeling impotent and helpless. At least in a gunfight, she knew she had an even chance to survive and win.
Schwarz looked at the roof of the cave. “Don’t worry. The tunnel’s holding up. We’re under enough rock that it’ll take a direct hit to bring it down.”
A loud thunderclap split the air in the cave, and Arquillo and the Stony Man warriors curled up in reaction to the nearby explosion.
“Say something else to tempt fate, smart-ass,” Lyons grumbled.
Schwarz held a finger up to his lips, then pointed to the roof of the cave. The rolling thunder of the air strikes had stopped, the drones’ rocket pods spent and empty. Schwarz grinned. “I was counting their shots. That was it.”
“Good,” Lyons answered. “With any luck, they’ll send out a patrol. It’ll be a relief to have a human opponent.”
CHAPTER FOUR
It didn’t take long for Phoenix Force to grab the hard drives out of the controllers’ computers. They just ripped open the casings and sliced the IDE cables. The hard drives were durable and fit into Manning’s backpack.
