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“Sort of like who you guys really are, right?” Combs countered. “I don’t buy that line about you being just some JD special task force.”
McCarter interjected, telling the CIA agent, “You want to come along for the ride, fine and dandy. Just save the nosing around for the enemy, all right?”
Combs held up his hands. “No problem. Just curious, that’s all.”
Before McCarter could respond further, the door to the cockpit opened and the other CIA agent made his way to the main cabin. Junior Hale was shorter than his colleague, thickset but in a way that suggested the bulk was more muscle than fat.
“Two minutes to Geronimo,” he announced, moving toward the doorway through which the men would be jumping. “After the insert, Paulie’s gonna fly back and refuel, then wait on our word to swoop in for a pickup.”
“Works for me,” McCarter said.
Hale was about to open the door when he spied the TCD. “What the hell is that?” he echoed.
Combs and McCarter exchanged a look. Both men grinned, then Combs told his colleague, “You don’t wanna know.”
T HE TRAINING CAMP’S southernmost sentry tower rose on a sturdy wooden framework just inside a greenbelt of thick, thorn-tipped bramble that infested the otherwise infertile, red-soiled hillside and helped to create a natural, if incomplete, barrier around the facility. Yusra Wahin, a rail-thin twenty-year-old Hezbollah recruit who’d just completed his third week of training, was posted on the upper platform, armed with a Kalashnikov AK-47 manufactured two years before he was born. High-powered field binoculars were slung around his neck, and clipped to the belt holding up his baggy camo pants was a black-market Motorola HT1000 two-way radio. Wahin was halfway through his shift, battling monotony and an urge to drop to the planks and catch some much-needed sleep. Sentry duty, after all, had come on the heels of a day already filled with calisthenics, training exercises and indoctrination seminars.
From his vantage point, Wahin could also see two other observation posts rising up from the bramble’s edge on the far side of the camp. Sentries were posted there, as well, and the guard suspected they were combating the same ennui that weighed on him. He could see smoke trailing upward from one of the silhouetted figures and immediately felt a craving for a cigarette. He fought off the urge, however. Smoking was supposedly forbidden by sentries, and Wahin lacked the impunity of his older counterpart. He would have to wait until dawn, when he was relieved from his post, to indulge himself.
Wahin had completed his twelfth tiresome lap around the railed confines of the platform when he detected movement up in the mountains to his left. He first suspected it was one of the countless wild goats that periodically roamed up from the valley, but a closer look revealed that the figure was moving on two legs, clutching something difficult to mistake for anything but a long-barreled firearm. Wahin immediately stopped his pacing and grabbed his binoculars, the better to confirm his growing fear.
It was an armed intruder, and he wasn’t alone. As Wahin panned with the binoculars, he spotted several more men clearing the ridgeline and fanning out as they began to charge downhill toward the camp.
The sentry anxiously lowered the binoculars and grabbed his two-way radio. He’d raised the device to his lips and was about to relay the alarm when he was struck in the chest by what felt like a white-hot firebrand. The blow threw him off balance and he dropped the walkie-talkie as he veered backward, an intense pain radiating from where he’d been hit. By the time it occurred to him that he’d just been shot, Wahin had careened against the railing behind him. The thin wood splintered under his weight and the recruit instinctively flung his arms outward, clawing at the air as he toppled from the tower. When he struck the half-empty water tank below him, Yusra Wahin’s neck snapped, sending him to his Maker.
W HEN THE GUARD LANDED on the water tank, a dull, gonglike peal echoed across the mountainside. Rafael Encizo scowled as he lowered the high-powered M-110 he’d used to bring the man down.
“So much for the element of surprise,” he muttered to Calvin James. “If this peashooter didn’t get anyone’s attention, that sure as hell did!”
“Not much we can do about it but get a move on,” James said, shifting his grip on three of the hastily gathered parachutes with which Phoenix Force and their CIA counterparts had touched down on the ridgeline. McCarter had already hauled the other three chutes halfway down the mountainside and, with the help of CIA Agent Hale, was pitching them over the nearest row of bramble standing between them and the camp. Hawkins was off to the left, moving at a slower pace, the TCD-100 tucked close to his chest. With him was Roger Combs, the other Company operative.
Encizo nodded tersely and followed close behind as James loped downhill to the right of McCarter and Hale. By the time they’d reached another long-running patch of bramble, sentries posted atop the far towers had spotted them. Volleys of rounds thumped into the dirt around them as they ducked low behind the thorn bush.
“Here, give me a quick hand,” James said, unraveling the parachutes in the dirt. The nylon fabric was thin, but when the canopies were folded and placed on top of one another, sandwiching the suspension lines, they would provide a layer thick enough to partially blunt the stabbing force of the bramble thorns. The two Stony Man commandos, following McCarter and Hale’s lead, draped the parachutes over the coarse shrubbery, then quickly steeled themselves and bounded over. James grunted as he felt several thorns poke through the makeshift barrier as well as his pant legs, drawing blood along his right thigh. Encizo cursed as he took a few barbs of his own. Within seconds they’d cleared the obstacle and were forced to dive in separate directions to avoid the next volley of rifle fire from the sentry towers.
“One down, two to go,” James confirmed, ignoring the blood that had begun to seep through his pants. He waited out another few rounds from the enemy, then crawled back to the parachutes and quickly gathered them up. Encizo, meanwhile, brought his semiautomatic back into play, taking sight through the M-110’s 30 mm KAC scope and triggering a return shot. Far off across the camp, the sentry in the northeast tower slumped to his platform.
“I was talking about the bramble, but that’s okay,” James drawled, stuffing the parachutes under his arm. He glanced down at a thin rivulet of blood trailing from his combat boots into the rust-colored dirt.
“Look on the bright side,” Encizo told him, grinning savagely. “Leave a trail like that and we won’t have any trouble finding our way back.”
M C C ARTER AND H ALE HAD MADE it over their first hurdle, but when they tried to retrieve the parachutes that had shielded them from the briar, the canopies wouldn’t give.
“They must be stuck on a branch,” the CIA agent said after giving the chutes another sharp tug.
McCarter, who was trading shots with the lone remaining sentry, called out to Hale without taking his eyes off his target. “Leave ’em, then,” he said. “We’ll have to try to make an end run around the bushes.”
Hale let go of the parachutes and grabbed his M-16/M-203 combo rifle. He fingered the carbine’s trigger and was unleashing a volley at the distant guard tower when a return round from the sentry clipped him in the ribs.
“Son of a bitch!” he swore, grimacing as he dropped to one knee.
McCarter looked around and spotted a boulder heap twenty yards to his left. He fired a quick autoburst at the sentry, then rushed to Hale’s side, pulling him up to his feet.
“C’mon, mate.”
McCarter helped the wounded agent straggle along the briar line to the rock formation. Once they reached it, the Briton eased Hale to the ground. Bullets sang off the boulders above their heads as McCarter tore open the other man’s shirt to get a better look at the wound.
“Went clean through. How’s your breathing?”
Hale winced as he dragged in air and let it out slowly, then spit into his hand, checking for blood. “Missed the lung, at any rate.”
“You’ll need to hang back and staunch the blood flow.” McCarter set down his M-16 long enough to pull off his shirt and tear off one of the sleeves. “These won’t be exactly sterilized, but they’ll have to do.”
Once he’d torn the sleeve in two, the Phoenix Force Leader handed the makeshift compresses to Hale, who was now reclining against one of the larger boulders. The CIA agent needed both hands to press the cloth against the entry and exit wounds. Blood quickly seeped through, reddening his fingers.
“Go on,” he told McCarter. “If I’m still kicking when the dust settles, I’m Type O and’ll probably be down a few pints.”
McCarter nodded, putting on his now-sleeveless camo shirt. “We’ll take care of you,” he assured Hale, “and when it’s over I’ll buy you a couple pints of Guinness, too.”
“Deal.”
“Mind if we swap popguns?” McCarter asked, reaching for the CIA agent’s combo. “The grenade launcher might come in handy.”
“Be my guest.”
McCarter handed the other man his M-16, then cast his shirt aside and clutched Hale’s over-under. He scrambled halfway up the boulder heap and was forced to duck when sniper fire glanced off the rocks. From the higher vantage point, he was able to see past the briar line. If he could get to the other side and dogleg to his left, there was a dirt access road that he figured would take him to the camp without having to contend with the thorn bushes.
Inching upward, McCarter propped his borrowed carbine in a niche between two rocks and sighted up on the far guard tower through the M-16’s scope. From his position he wasn’t able to get a clear bead on the sentry, but the enemy gunner had shifted his attention to James and Encizo, who were using their parachutes to clear yet another of the bramble clots. Taking advantage of his foe’s distraction, McCarter sprang forward, bounding up over the top of the rock heap and down to the other side. He hit the ground running and dodged left, crouching low as he made his way to the road. By the time he reached it, the remaining sentry had been taken out, courtesy of Encizo’s M-110.
As McCarter jogged down the road leading toward the camp, he saw the first sign of Hezbollah reinforcements rising up from their underground lair. Like ants, they began to emerge from several different openings and fan out in all directions.
“Not good,” McCarter murmured to himself. “C’mon, T.J., get busy with that bloody Gopher Snake already!”
CHAPTER NINE
The TCD-100 had essentially been the creation of Stony Man armorer John Kissinger, but Hawkins had spent time at the Farm’s weapons lab helping Cowboy construct the device and configure its computerized operating system. He’d also worked side by side with Kissinger during the Gopher Snake’s field trials, so it was no surprise that when the weapon was given the green light for the battlefield, Hawkins had been placed in charge of its operation.
As the battle raged around them, Hawkins and Roger Combs had detoured into an earthen culvert that ran along the training camp’s eastern perimeter. Sat cam footage had pinpointed several tunnel openings along the length of the ditch, and while the Stony Man cybercrew considered them to be escape routes, Hawkins figured they could also be used to access the Hezbollah’s underground lair.
There was water in the culvert, ankle-deep and filled with sediment that clawed at the men’s boots, forcing them to move slowly. Hawkins had the Gopher Snake tucked under one arm, leaving the other free to defend himself with a KRISS Super V submachine gun. Combs, who was carrying a pair of full-face gas masks, was similarly armed. The five-pound, .45-caliber firearms were light enough to wield with one hand, and the two warriors had a chance to prove it moments later when three Hezbollah soldiers emerged from the nearest tunnel armed with AK-47s. Combs and Hawkins had the drop on them and burped a quick half dozen rounds their way. The Super V’s muted recoil and muzzle rise allowed for deadly accuracy, especially at such close range, and all three men crumpled into the brackish water without having had a chance to return fire.
The intruders forged ahead, ready to empty their magazines should others appear. Nearing the tunnel, they sidestepped the bodies. When no one else came forward, Hawkins crouched near the raised entrance and unclipped the TCD-100’s remote transceiver from its underhousing.
“Cover me,” he whispered to Combs.
Combs nodded, his eyes on the tunnel. Hawkins adjusted the remote’s settings, then carefully set the Gopher Snake into the mouth of the tunnel. He flicked on the transceiver and stared at the small, embedded screen providing him with an image taken from the wheeled device’s front-mounted camera.
“Okay, little guy,” Hawkins whispered, activating the TCD. “Go do your stuff.”
“G ET UP AND MOVE OUT !” the Hezbollah commandant shouted from the doorway leading to the subterranean barracks. “We’re under attack!”
Half dressed and barely half awake, a dozen recruits staggered from their cots and grabbed assault rifles, then warily followed their burly leader into a leg of the networked tunnels carved out beneath the training camp. The nearest staircase leading up to the surface was to their left. As they approached it, the men came upon a faint haze wafting through the tunnel. Immediately they began to hack and cough, their eyes tearing with a burning sensation.
“Tear gas!” the commandant shouted, blinking furiously as he veered to one side, crashing against the tunnel wall. Glancing down the passageway, he spotted the TCD-100 rolling toward him like some oversize toy. The tear gas spewed from a spray nozzle just below the Gopher Snake’s angled Kevlar shield. His eyes stinging, a wave of nausea sweeping over him, the commandant nonetheless willed himself to raise his AK-47. He was about to unleash a round when strobe lights mounted on the TCD’s shield began to blink with staccato frenzy. The intense, flickering illumination temporarily blinded the man as well as the fighters huddled close to him, and though he managed to fire his weapon, only a few rounds glanced off the TCD-100’s bulletproof shield; the rest pummeled the ground.
Others fired as well with the same futility. Moments later they were brought to their knees when a partition in the Gopher Snake’s shield briefly parted, allowing it to launch a pair of modified XM-84 stun grenades. The flash-enhanced explosions echoed loudly through the enclosed space, further immobilizing the combatants. They fell upon one another, trying to flee the small, wheeled contraption that had effectively neutralized them. As the tear gas thickened around them, the men doubled over and retched violently, too caught up in their misery to notice Hawkins and Combs advancing toward them, their hastily donned gas masks equipped with built-in night-vision goggles that minimized the effect of the tear gas.
Combs gunned down several of the men and Hawkins knocked a few others unconscious with the butt of his KRISS subgun, then cleared the way so that he could use his transceiver to guide the Gopher Snake past them and around the next bend in the tunnel.
“Okay, I’m impressed,” Combs murmured through his gas mask.
“Gotta say, I am, too,” Hawkins confessed. The device had worked even better than he’d expected, and the TCD-100 had spent only half its arsenal. Hawkins figured the device was still capable of dealing with any other enemy forces still lurking in the tunnels.
“C’mon, boy,” he called down to the Snake as if taking a pet dog out for a leisurely stroll. “Let’s keep up the good work.”
R AFAEL E NCIZO AND Calvin James had cleared their way past the last briar hurdle. Both men were bleeding thanks to the barbed thorns, but the wounds seemed less threatening than the throng of dispersing Hezbollah warriors they now found themselves faced with. Veering past the sentry’s body at the base of the nearest tower, the Stony Man commandos took up positions on either side of the water tank and began firing. They were answered by AK-47s, a steady barrage of NATO rounds forcing them to press close to the tank, which took enough hits to begin draining water out onto the reddish hardpan.
“What do you think?” James called to Encizo as he reloaded his carbine. “We’re outnumbered, what, maybe five to one?”
“A least that,” Encizo shouted over the noise of his assault rifle. He saw two men go down near the tents, weapons falling from their lifeless hands. “That’s usually par for the course, though, right?” he added.
“Yeah, I guess they can’t all be picnics like in Damascus.”
Once James reloaded, he held back firing for a moment, instead grabbing at the ammunition belt slung around his hips. He unclipped a baseball-size M-67 frag grenade and quickly enabled it, then cocked his arm and flung it in the direction of a tunnel opening where still more terrorist recruits were surfacing. The explosive detonated shy of the hole, but its casualty radius was wide enough to kill half the emerging soldiers outright and pound the others with frag shards, voiding any chance they might help ramp the odds still further against Phoenix Force.
The grenade blast was still resonating through the valley when it was joined by another, this one care of a 40-mm high-explosive round launched from McCarter’s M-203 into a supply truck several Hezbollah gunmen had taken cover behind. The initial blast ruptured the gas tank, further disintegrating the vehicle. There were screams of agony as shrapnel sprayed the surrounding enemy. As the maimed terrorists fell to the smoke-shrouded earth, James and Encizo ventured clear of the water tank and advanced, raking the camp with their carbines. Behind them, Junior Hale had apparently stopped his bleeding enough to crawl up the rocks and add to the onslaught with bursts from McCarter’s M-16.
The tide of the battle quickly shifted in Phoenix Force’s favor. The covert ops fanned out, whittling down the enemy as they sought to encircle the camp and block off escape routes. When no further combatants emerged from the tunnels, McCarter and the others assumed that Hawkins had made good use of the Gopher Snake and kept Hezbollah from replenishing its forces aboveground.
As the surviving terrorists saw their ranks dwindle, the fight began to go out of them. Several men threw down their weapons and dropped to their knees, placing their hands on their heads in a gesture of surrender. A few others fired wildly in midflight, racing away from the smoldering carcass of the bombed truck, only to be cut down. Two recruits scrambled into one of the parked Jeeps in hopes of escaping out onto the main road, but another frag grenade, this one heaved by Encizo, rolled beneath the chassis and its concussive blast flipped the vehicle into the air, throwing the men clear before landing upside down in the dirt. Stunned, the recruits cried out for mercy and straggled to their knees, joining those who’d already given up the fight.
Three others made a valiant last stand near one of the far sentry towers, forcing James and Encizo to flatten themselves on the turf to avoid rounds from their AK-47s. McCarter and Hale responded by shifting aim and targeting the gunners. Within seconds the men were down, having fired the last shots that would be heard from the enemy.
Once he sensed the skirmish was over, McCarter warily stepped clear of the rocks he’d taken cover behind, his eyes on the carnage.
“Canvass the area for flare-ups,” he shouted to James and Encizo.
McCarter’s colleagues rose to their feet and began to cautiously make their way through the camp, motioning for the surviving Hezbollah warriors to group together near the veiled helicopter. The beleaguered recruits complied, some of them sobbing, others crying out in pain. McCarter, meanwhile, backtracked to the boulders where he’d left Hale. The CIA agent was slumped across the rocks, M-16 at his side. The Phoenix Force leader climbed up to him. Hale had lost his makeshift compresses and his initial wounds bled heavily onto the rocks. He’d taken two more slugs, as well, one to the shoulder, the other a clear killshot to the head. McCarter fingered the man’s wrist for a pulse, already knowing he wouldn’t find one.
“Damn it,” McCarter murmured.
There was nothing to be done for Hale. McCarter grimly braced himself, then hoisted the dead man off the rocks and slung him over his shoulder. He could feel Hale’s blood drenching him as he slowly hauled the body back to the camp. James and Encizo had finished rounding up the prisoners. There were ten of them. As McCarter went to join them near the helicopter, he detected movement through the smoke near where James’s grenade had earlier cratered the hardpan. A half-clad Hezbollah soldier was rising up from the tunnels, hands clasped to his head. Even as the man was stepping out onto the level ground, another recruit followed behind him, then yet another. Soon a total of seven young men had appeared, all unarmed, all hacking and blinking away tears from the gas that had left them defenseless. Finally Hawkins brought up the rear, still wearing his gas mask, still clutching his KRISS Super V subgun.
“Nice work, Teej,” McCarter told him, dropping to one knee so that he could ease Hale’s body to the ground.
“Thank the Gopher Snake,” Hawkins replied. “Little sucker worked like a charm.”
McCarter was bathed in sweat and blood. He rose slowly, his legs aching from the exertion of toting the corpse.
“What’s the situation down there?” he asked.
“There’s still a few men in the tunnels,” Hawkins reported. “Five dead, probably that many out cold, at least for now. Combs has ’em covered, but I’d best get back before they come to.”
McCarter nodded. “Did you spot anything besides barracks?”
“About what you’d expect,” Hawkins reported. “Command post, weapons cache, storage area. Plenty to search through.”
“Combs has his camera, so go ahead and let him take a few shots, but don’t spend any more time down there than you have to.”
“You want him to call for our chopper?”
“Hold off for now,” McCarter said, glancing at the net-shrouded Huey. “If we can get this sucker going, we won’t have to wait around.”
Hawkins nodded, leaving his prisoners in Encizo’s care and venturing back underground. McCarter turned to James as he approached the helicopter. “Help me get the net off.”
“Gonna hotwire it?” James asked as he grabbed one edge of the thick netting slung over the Huey’s rotors. He worked with one hand, keeping his M-16 trained on the prisoners with the other. McCarter was doing the same.
“If that’s what it takes,” the Briton said. “We’ll have room for Hale and a couple prisoners. Hopefully some of them speak English and will horsetrade info for some leniency.”
“What about the rest of them?” James asked.
“If it were us, they’d probably just gun us down and be done with it,” McCarter guessed. “Can’t see doing it, though. We’ll just leave ’em.”
James stared at the prisoners. They were all young, some in their teens. They looked back at him, some still fearful while others had turned sullen, their eyes filled with hate. It sickened James to think that these men would no doubt quickly regroup with others and resume their training, possibly even more determined than ever to turn themselves into killing machines for the Hezbollah cause. But he knew McCarter was right; they couldn’t in good conscience just massacre the whole lot of them. To do so would be to drag Phoenix Force down to the enemy’s level. It was bad enough that the Stony Man commandos had to regularly navigate their way through moral gray areas to carry out their assignments; if they were to succumb completely to the dark side, they would have betrayed not only their country, but also themselves. Still, the matter didn’t sit well with James.
“Gotta say,” he finally murmured, “giving them a free pass sucks, big time.”
“Tell me about it,” McCarter said. “Sometimes war is more than just hell.”
CHAPTER TEN
Leystra Hot Springs, California
Leystra Hot Springs was a once prominent New Age retreat located eighty miles east of Los Angeles in the heart of a heavily wooded forest blackened by the 2007 fires that had turned Southern California into hell on Earth. The twenty-one-acre retreat had fallen on hard times even before the fire, and when flames had ravaged most of the outbuildings and neighboring establishments, the facility’s owners had filed for bankruptcy and closed its doors. The grounds had been fenced off haphazardly with posted caveats against trespassing, but the low-bidding rent-a-cops hired to back up the warnings rarely so much as drove past the isolated property, much less searched it for intruders.
As such, the haven had become a retreat, not for the pampered and well-to-do, but rather a succession of downtrodden squatters, some hardbound transients, others former area residents left homeless in the wake of the fires. However, judging from the aerial surveillance that had prompted Able Team’s early morning arrival, it appeared that the hot springs’ latest uninvited guests were of a far more sinister nature.
Grimaldi and his Stony Man confederates weren’t the only ones targeting the isolated facility. The California Highway Patrol was in the process of barricading the access road in both directions, and SWAT teams had already spilled out of two armored Humvees and begun to venture into the dense brush surrounding the hot springs. To the north, another pair of helicopters—one a CHP H-20, the other a refurbished SWAT Huey—hovered low over the mountainous terrain that stretched behind the retreat. The heavy show of force was in response to word that more than one person had been seen on the grounds. Kouri Ahmet apparently wasn’t alone.
“Whatever happened to the good old days when we took care of these things ourselves?” Carl Lyons muttered as he eyeballed the backup forces. The Able Team commander was sitting beside Grimaldi up front in the Bell’s cockpit; Blancanales and Schwarz were in back, feeding ammo cartridges into their M-16s.
“Everybody’s gotta feel important, I guess,” Blancanales said.
Grimaldi eased the chopper over the leafy oak trees surrounding the retreat, then hovered in place above one of the hot springs. The pool had once been enclosed, but fire had claimed the surrounding structure, reducing it to charred ruins. Half submerged in the murky, steaming water was the missing Forest Service pickup. Floating facedown nearby amid scattered leaves and debris were two bodies, one stripped to its shorts, the other still uniformed.
“That’s gotta be the rangers,” Lyons said, peering down at the corpses. “Let’s see if we can’t give those poor bastards some justice.”
“Closest I can get is the parking lot,” Grimaldi said.
