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As Lyons, Schwarz and Blancanales reached their cover, the three partners made a quick visual verification that the team was whole and unharmed.
“No hits?” Lyons asked.
“Nope,” Blancanales returned. Schwarz simply grunted agreement.
“Not even on the body armor, not that we’d have been able to handle it. Those are five-five-six they’re pumping out,” Schwarz added. “They missed, but now they know how quick we are.”
“So we go sneaky,” Lyons returned, unleathering the machine pistol stored in a shoulder holster under his windbreaker. Long ago, Able Team had learned the benefits of carrying fully automatic handguns with folding foregrips for better control and utility. In the early days, these had been Beretta 93-R machine pistols. Now they opted for the Heckler and Koch MP-7. The bonus of the compact machine pistol was the fact that it not only had a vertical foregrip that could be folded to fit in a shoulder holster, but it also had an extendable stock to give it riflelike stability. Lyons wasn’t much of a fan of the MP-7’s 4.6 mm projectiles, but they moved at a blistering, Kevlar-defeating velocity and were still bigger than the rounds of a Heckler and Koch G-11 autorifle, which was much larger and bulkier
The three Stony Man warriors snapped out the collapsing shoulder stocks, folding down the forward grips. The folding iron sights were propped into place so that they resembled the precision sights of the M-4s and M-16s they normally utilized. As they did so, the team shifted among the wreckage of the arson-gutted boatyard, seeking better cover and concealment, even as enemy rifles crackled, trying to pin them down.
“These bastards are getting on my nerves,” Blancanales snarled as a spray of debris splashed against him from the impact of a dozen 5.56 mm rounds. “Especially since this seems like amateur hour.”
Lyons and Schwarz heard their partner over the hands-free communicators that they wore. Lyons spoke into his throat mike. “Confirm...low training?”
“I’m still here, and I’ve given them two clean shots at me,” Blancanales replied. “Do the math.”
“No fair, Pol,” Schwarz interrupted. “Ironman can barely do math in a classroom, let alone when he’s getting shot at.”
Lyons flipped off Schwarz. “All right. New plan.”
“Fall back and kill?” Blancanales asked over the headset.
“No. Just cover me,” Lyons said. He handed his machine pistol over to Schwarz.
“Bluejay,” Schwarz muttered.
Lyons pulled out one of his handguns, a Smith and Wesson .45, and held it between his thumb and forefinger. “Stop! Stop shooting!”
His voice was shrill, terrified. It was a completely alien sound compared to all that the other two members of Able Team had heard before, but this was completely new to the men trying to shoot at them.
“I’m just an accountant! Stop shooting!”
“Throw your gun out!” one of the shooters shouted in response.
“Paper jockey!” Schwarz snarled out loud. He waylaid his MP-7 and fired his pistol, intentionally missing Lyons, but that elicited a wave of precision covering fire immediately.
Lyons tossed the Smith and Wesson on the ground, without a care, just like an inept desk worker would. He stumbled out into the open, arms wavering in the air, his eyes cast downward.
The Bluejay ploy was a simple one. One member of the team would feign injury or incompetence to call the attention of the enemy away from the others. So far, the three of them were aware that their opponents were only pretending incompetence on their own. Lyons’s use of himself as bait had not drawn enemy fire because they had some other agenda. When the prisoner that offered himself had come under fire from Schwarz, their precision shot up to deadly levels of effect.
Whoever these conspirators were, they were sharp and alert, but they were also curious about the trio of men who stumbled around the boatyard in Norfolk. That meant that they wanted and needed answers. If Lyons could get close, he might have a chance to take one while they were still in prisoner-acquisition mode.
And if not, well, Lyons still had his Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum in its shoulder holster. Lyons was an old-school LAPD officer, and his side arm had been a grandfathered revolver, either a Colt Python or its Smith and Wesson counterpart. Sure, the Colt 1911 had a lighter trigger and a faster reload, and it sat flatter beneath his concealment garments, but Lyons had a trigger finger that was trained for fast and deadly double-action revolver shooting. This wasn’t just any .357 Magnum, either, it was a Military and Police R8. It not only had the unusual five-inch, Picatinny-railed barrel, but it also was fed from an eight-round cylinder—matching the capacity of a 1911, but not the .45 auto he’d discarded, and was rendered portable by an alloy frame.
Recoil in rapid-fire with his preferred 125-grain jacketed hollowpoints was quite easy, thanks to a set of rubber finger-grooved grips and “enough” mass. Lyons could draw and fire the R8, a name referring to its being an 8-shot revolver, and put all eight hits inside of a playing card at fifteen feet, or hit four different targets twice in the space of five seconds.
It still wouldn’t help much if he were directly under the gun, but Able’s version of the Bluejay ploy counted on a full team effort.
Right now, Lyons could tell that there were three sets of sights on him directly, but judging by the hail of fire that started this off, the rest were pretty well out of his line of sight, at least since his hands were up.
Fortunately for him, he had two highly trained combat veterans on his side, and thanks to his earpiece, he was picking up the pings from their laser “painters,” which gave him a relative range and position for each of the enemy crew.
There were nine of them, three for each team member, at least those who were in sight. Lyons figured on at least two more drivers, plus security guns for their vehicles. His best guess put thirteen against them. It wasn’t the worst that Able Team had faced, but if this death squad was worth its salt, Lyons was in for one hell of a fight and he was going to start it standing out in the open.
“Who the hell are you?” the commando who had addressed him previously snarled.
Lyons kept his hands up at the level of his ears, his face wrinkled and masked in fear. He could only imagine the ribbing that he would receive later from his partners about his acting. That didn’t matter. Lyons simply had to confuse the enemy for a few more moments, not win an award for best actor.
“I’m just an accountant, I told you that already! Please just let me go.”
In the open, Lyons could better make out the uniforms of the gunmen and the gear they were packing. The man who was talking to him wore a dull, nonreflective helmet with bullet-resistant wraparound goggles. So clad, he was relatively safe from a head shot. The rifleman’s torso and shoulders were no less vulnerable, polycarbide shells shielding his shoulder joints and the heavy load-bearing vest betraying its built-in trauma plates. Whoever had sent these men to ensure that the Norfolk boatyard’s secrets remain buried beneath ash and submerged in the cold waters of the harbor was not taking any chances by sending the killers in with secondhand weapons and armor.
Blancanales’s voice hissed through the earpiece of Lyons’s hands-free communicator. “All right, Ironman, we’ve got the measure of these assholes. It’s all up to you. Give us the signal and we mop these idiots off the deck.”
Lyons simply nodded, maintaining his facade of fear. Thanks to the observations of Schwarz and Blancanales, he had a good idea of where the enemy had set themselves up. Right now he knew that there were two killers just out of his line of sight but in position to pop up and riddle him with bullets. However, since they had been sighted by his partners, they were far less of a threat simply because either Blancanales or Schwarz already had them targeted. The hidden gunmen were only a secondary threat compared to the grim, armored figure who was already addressing him.
This was going to have to be done the old-fashioned way. “My arms are getting tired, can I put them down please?” Lyons whimpered as he spoke.
“I don’t want any funny business from you, motherfucker,” the cleanup crew killer snarled in warning. He didn’t lower the muzzle of his rifle, a SIG 556 folding-stock assault rifle. Lyons knew that his body armor couldn’t take a point-blank volley from the killer; Kevlar might just as well have been gossamer for all the good it would do him. “Leave your damn mitts in the air.”
Lyons noticed a jutting steel I-beam that had the mass and durability to deflect the storm of rifle fire, and it was just within a few yards of his position. Just to be certain, Lyons mentally measured the distance once more, and then with an explosion of power he leaped into the shadow of the I-beam. Even as he dived for cover he clawed the N-frame .357 Magnum from its hidden holster. The enemy commando opened up with his SIG, but Lyons was no longer where the muzzle of the weapon was pointing as he pulled the trigger. A swarm of buzzing hornets whipped through the air, close enough that one of the bullets plucked at the sleeve of his windbreaker. Regardless of how close the enemy’s fire had come to ending his life, Lyons was shielded and down once again.
From his right, Schwarz and his MP-7 entered the fight, the little machine pistol’s 4.6 mm bullets zipping to catch one of the ambushers in the back of his head. The gunman’s helmet deflected much of the glancing burst, but the single projectile hit dead-on, its reinforced point punching through the Kevlar helmet and into the skull of the would-be murderer. An explosion of skull fragments, glass and spongy dollops of brain matter sprayed to the air close enough to Lyons that it peppered the left shoulder of his windbreaker.
Lyons didn’t mind brain stains on the Department of Justice windbreaker. He was far more concerned with the rifleman who was trying to burn him out of cover with extended bursts from an assault rifle. Lyons must have annoyed the killer because he had abandoned fire discipline and was shooting without regard for how much ammo he had in the weapon. In only a few seconds the sniper would run out, and once there was a lull in the firing, Lyons was poised to make his move.
The enemy rifle went silent and Lyons could hear a muffled curse coming from the angry commando. Too late the shooter realized his error and was torn between fumbling a new magazine into the weapon and ducking behind cover himself. That pause allowed Lyons the time he needed to whip around the I-beam, center the front sight of his Magnum on his enemy’s goggles and milk the trigger of the revolver. Punching out of the barrel at over 1500 feet per second, Lyons’s shot smashed into the tough ballistic glass of the killer’s eyewear, breaking through it and crushing the forehead beneath.
From Lyons’s left, Blancanales had already entered the battle with a quieter opening gambit. The wily old Able Team warrior had fast-balled a fragmentation grenade hard enough at the head of the third assailant that it popped straight up into the air over the dazed gunman. As the handheld bomb reached the apex of its bounce, it exploded. A sheet of fire and shrapnel rained down, scything into the helmet and shoulder armor of the man. Heavily protected, the gunner was unharmed by the fragments thrown off by the grenade, but the pressure wave struck him like a baseball bat and even the protection of his helmet couldn’t keep him from staggering dazedly into the open.
Blancanales hated that he had to be so ruthless toward the stunned foe, but the armored assassin still had a firm grip on his weapon and would recover his senses within a few moments. Taking aim, Blancanales opened fire and peppered the gunman’s chest with a full-auto salvo. While the action was tactically sound, despite its ruthlessness, Blancanales was not being unnecessarily cruel. He was simply stopping a would-be killer from continuing to target federal investigators.
Just because Able Team was undercover as Department of Justice employees didn’t mean that they weren’t actual Feds. This was as much self-defense as rooting out the truth behind who initiated the assassinations of the OSHA investigators. Nine innocent men, all unarmed, had died by fire to keep a secret here in the Norfolk boatyard.
Clearly the shooters who had arrived and immediately opened fire were not police officers. Furthermore they would definitely know what was going on and who had likely been behind the others’ deaths.
Blancanales held off moving on to another target, keeping cover between himself and the other gunmen. These shooters were wearing armor, so he waited to be sure that the 4.6 mm bullets from his machine pistol had been able to punch through to his enemy’s vitals.
It turned out that Blancanales had made the right choice, because the staggered killer scrambled back to his feet a second time, but he wasn’t standing still to be the target for further full-auto hammering. Even as the gunman retreated, two more riflemen opened up, their rifles chattering and pelting the hunk of rubble that Blancanales used as a shield. Unfortunately for them, they missed, bullets smashing against mass too dense for their 5.56 mm rounds to penetrate, and Blancanales had mapped out a line of retreat in case he was attacked from that vector.
Blancanales paused just enough to unclip another of his grenades from a small fanny pack. He plucked the cotter pin and released the spoon, igniting the blaster’s fuse before hurling it toward the rattle of enemy weapons. There was a brief pause in the shooting, accompanied by an almost comical cry of “Shit!”
The humor of the moment was punctuated by the earth-shattering roar of the grenade’s detonation, body parts spiraling away from the source of the well-placed blast. A distant explosion hadn’t been able to shred through a steel helmet and trauma plates, but the enemy commandos didn’t have that kind of hard shell on their legs. Even if they did, a sheet of kinetic force severed the limbs where the joints in the armor were weakest.
“We’re hoping to get one or two alive, remember,” Schwarz said grimly.
“Acknowledged,” Blancanales replied. “Let’s hope they have the same orders.”
The stunned and wounded gunner, having survived two attempts at putting him down, became Blancanales’s focus. He was leaving a blood trail, which meant at least one of the prior attacks had caused him injury. Once hurt, he’d be easier to take down.
With his target in sight, Blancanales rushed forward, keeping out of the fields of fire of the enemy gunners, zagging toward the downed commando. He reloaded the MP-7 on the run, the magazine-in-grip design making it easier for his left hand to find the well that his right was wrapped around. It was so easy he could do it blindfolded, and since he hadn’t run the SMG into slide-lock, he knew he had a round chambered.
A gunman edged into the open in front of the wily veteran commando, looking to cover his fallen friend. He also happened to have a device that was decidedly not an assault weapon in his hands. Blancanales only barely had a few instants of warning before he dived beneath the twin barbs of an underbarrel-mounted Taser. The wires fell across his shoulders, but as they were insulated to contain the voltage that had been directed toward whatever had been stuck by the pair of darts, the charge in the slender threads was impotent against him.
That couldn’t be said for the weapon atop the Taser, an M-4 assault rifle. The killer figured that if he couldn’t take Blancanales as a prisoner, then he’d simply open fire and remove him as a threat. Blancanales didn’t sit still for this, however. He rolled onto his back, getting himself out of the path of the initial burst of rifle fire, triggering the H&K MP-7 at the man’s shins. The 4.6 mm bullets didn’t contain a lot of mass, but as they were composed of dense slugs launched at more than 2400 feet per second, they struck the enemy gunner hard, splintering bone and muscle everywhere between his knees and ankles.
Without the ability to stand, the gunman collapsed onto his stunned friend, going from rescuer to restraint.
“Ironman!” Blancanales called. “Cover me! Two prisoners at four o’clock.”
Lyons would know that Blancanales would always put his position at two hours fast; it was one way that Able Team was able to engage in out-loud communication of their location without actually betraying where they actually were in relation to each other. Lyons opened up with his big .357 Magnum, firing three shots rapid-fire, drawing heat away from his partner even as his rounds tagged an enemy in his body armor. Trauma plates deflected the more lethal portion of Lyons’s salvo, but it was enough to convince the gunman to retreat back behind cover.
Lyons grimaced as he snapped open the cylinder, ejecting his spent brass and feeding in a special 8-round .357 Magnum speed-loader. The gun was back in action in two seconds, but before he left cover, Schwarz was at his side, handing him the MP-7 he’d ceded earlier.
“We don’t need to use kid gloves anymore. Punch through the armor and finish this fight,” Schwarz said.
Lyons smirked. “Never would have thought of that myself.”
He snapped open the stock and folded down the foregrip on the machine pistol. A 20-round magazine sat flush with the bottom of the grip, so he dumped it and slid home a 40-rounder. “What’s the estimate on how many left?”
Schwarz scanned around. “Three here, but there are still the drivers and vehicle security who could be coming in as backup.”
“That’s why you dropped off my MP-7,” Lyons said.
“Gonna head them off,” Schwarz said.
With that, the electronics genius disappeared from sight. Whatever the brilliant Schwarz had in mind, it would be explosive and deadly.
“They secure?” Lyons asked Blancanales through his headset.
“Roger that.”
“Keep your head down, too,” Lyons ordered.
With that, he lobbed a pair of flash-bang grenades in the direction of the enemy’s fire. They had split up, two in one group with a long gunner trying to flank. Lyons knew that he wouldn’t have much of an opportunity, even with the blinding and deafening force of the twin shock bombs. The headgear they wore would mitigate much of the force, but Lyons’s throws had been true. He was counting on a close-range burst of light and sound to buy him a few seconds.
He was up and firing, catching a fleeting touch of the bang. The two gunners he’d targeted as one clump were staggered where they stood, and Lyons poured on the heat from his machine pistol. The 40-round magazine disappeared in the space of seconds, but the Able Team commander had found every weak point in his opponents’ armor, punching bullets deep into their vitals. The lifeless men dropped their weapons, slumping to the ground.
As they fell, the last of the gunners was recovering from the concussion grenade that had rocked him. That mercenary was on Lyons’s flank, right in his blind spot. With a clear shot and no other enemies in sight, the rifleman took an extra moment to line up on the “vulnerable” Lyons when the thunder and bellow of Blancanales’s Smith and Wesson .45 erupted from ground level.
The shooter dropped his weapon as two 230-grain slugs struck him in one hip, shattering bone and snapping his pelvis. The twin slugs mushroomed on impact, going from just under half of an inch to a full three quarters of an inch of blossomed lead and copper. The duo of hammer blows tore an ugly, brutal channel through the gunman’s groin, breaking his other hip on the way out.
Paralyzed, he collapsed, almost face-to-face with the prone Blancanales.
One more stroke of the trigger, and the ambusher’s face disappeared, imploding under the thunderous impact of a third .45-caliber round.
Lyons knew that Blancanales had a line of sight on the last of the gunmen, having dealt with the men he’d take prisoner before backing him up.
In the distance, the unmistakable roar of plastic explosives split the air.
“You done there?” Lyons asked Schwarz via the headset.
“Grab a prisoner and rendezvous,” Schwarz answered. “We toss our guys into the back of our van, and Pol drives it to the safe house. We grab the other vehicles and bring them in and rip them apart for forensic evidence.”
“Sirens,” Blancanales said. “We made a hell of a lot of noise.”
“Grab one of these fools and let’s go,” Lyons suggested. “Hopefully the Farm’s screwing with police communications so we have a route out of here.”
“If so, good. If not, I’ll cut us a path without hurting any cops,” Blancanales replied.
“I’m counting on that.”
With that, Able Team rushed away from the Norfolk boatyard, prisoners in tow. They were gone with only seconds to spare when the police arrived, looking upon the carnage wrought by their explosive presence.
In the upcoming days, the Norfolk Police and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service would wonder what caused this brutal spat of violence, but would soon be distracted by yet more violence. Able Team was on the case, and they were up against a deadly conspiracy that was bringing far more to the fight than just guns.
CHAPTER TWO
Calvin James and Rafael Encizo checked over the scuba kits of the three partners, David McCarter, Gary Manning and T. J. Hawkins, even as the silo the five men stood within filled with seawater up to their knees. James was a scuba expert thanks to Navy SEAL training, while a lifetime of maritime salvage employment had honed Encizo into a master diver. As such, they took it upon themselves to perform safety checks on the rest of the team’s equipment. It was almost paranoid the way that they double-checked their partner’s preparations, but neither man wanted to take a chance with the lives of their dearest friends.
“All right, Mom!” T. J. Hawkins quipped as James manhandled his scuba tank. “If you fuss any more over me, I’ll miss the damn bus and you’ll have to drive me to school yourself.”
“Language, motherfucker!” James snapped back. “I’ll wash your fucking mouth out with soap.”
This back-and-forth solicited chuckles from the others even as they clamped the nozzles of their bubble lists’ self-contained breathing systems between their teeth. The packs that the five men wore were larger than standard scuba gear, but the extra bulk would prove to be worth its weight. Not only would the scrubber chamber in the system recycle their air, allowing for nearly limitless time under water, but the lack of bubbles would also lower their profile, making any approach from beneath the waves even stealthier. Under water, the extra mass would be less of a burden. Any additional effort would be further alleviated by the Swimmer Delivery Vehicle or SDV, an underwater equivalent of a convertible sports car meant for cutting through the depths with the “top down” at a speed far faster than any man could swim.
The silo was full of water now, and the pressure inside was equal to that outside of the submarine, making it easier to open the hatch and less of a shock when the five men exited the nuke sub to reach the SDV. The undersea craft from the U.S. Navy had brought them close to the hospitable island of La Palma, one of the most popular tourist spots in the Spanish Canary Islands. The sub had powered across the Atlantic at its maximum speed after picking up the members of Phoenix Force when they had been transferred from a helicopter launched from an aircraft carrier just off the coast of Virginia.
For now the rest of the United States Navy was still organizing an emergency blockade around the vacation spot besieged by terrorists. Both the United States Marine Corps and U.S. Navy SEALs were on full alert and ready to engage in hostage rescue, but were held at bay by the threat of deadly charges set in volcanic fissures on the caldera that made up the heart of the island. Local hotels were also packed with thousands of captive tourists rigged to explode. In the White House, the President knew that any conventional military intervention would result in lost lives, and the same threat stayed the hands of British and Spanish amphibious forces. Fortunately for the President of the United States, he was aware of the one group capable of being able to move in quietly, with all the training and flexibility to overcome even insane odds. That was the agency known as the Sensitive Operations Group, a top-secret facility stationed at Stony Man Farm, which boasted one of the most incredible cybertechnology information-gathering services in the world and two of the most elite combat teams ever to engage in warfare—Able Team and Phoenix Force.
The five Phoenix Force operatives swam to their stealth sled. The fifteen-foot-long craft looked like a torpedo whose center had been peeled open. The two aquatic jet engines were contained in the belly of the SDV, which could push through the depths at upwards of twenty-five knots. Because of that relative speed, a huge nosecone and windshield were in place to keep the water from pushing on the riders with great force. Ordinarily the SDV was meant for Navy SEAL commandos, so James and Encizo had stowed their armaments in purpose-built compartments on the vehicle. Both Phoenix Force divers were already familiar with the controls and operation of the SDV.
The La Palma terrorists had warned that if any covert-
operations teams were sighted on the island, and harmed any member of their force, the hotel jammed with upward of one thousand frightened tourists would be demolished.
Phoenix Force needed to plan their infiltration with extreme care. Though they brought with them suppressed submachine guns for later use, when hard contact was unavoidable, their most important weapons would be Manning’s air rifle, an assortment of knives and impact weapons and a pair of Barnett commando crossbows. Of these so-called silent weapons, Manning’s air rifle was the quietest. Unless they had disarmed the explosives threatening the tourists, any gunfight would be the absolute last resort. The darts fired from Manning’s air rifle were loaded with Thorazine, which would almost instantly put an enemy to sleep. This would allow them to have live prisoners to interrogate. However, if things tended toward a worsening situation, Manning also had a supply of deadly poison darts.
James slid behind the controls of the SDV, and with a jolt the impulse jets kicked in.
Gary Manning, due to his expertise in demolitions and engineering, had been among the group of Stony Man geniuses who had run equations regarding the consequences of a detonation. The other members of the scientific team had included Hermann Schwarz, Aaron Kurtzman, the Farm’s cyberteam leader, and several other Stony Man Farm experts. Every physics simulation, every math equation and every program told the same story. A detonation in the right spot along the cliffs making up the outer ring of the volcanic caldera would create a mammoth landslide, which would drop into the Atlantic with more than enough force and momentum to unleash a hemisphere-wide seismic event. Coastal cities would be flooded as far inland as fifteen miles, and any harbor facilities would be destroyed beyond repair.
During the 2011 earthquake in Japan, the world had seen the raw, unmitigated power of the tsunami against the modern coastline. Entire towns and cities had been carved from the land, either bulldozed miles inland or sucked into the Pacific. The tsunami that would be unleashed by the landslide in La Palma would be like that, except that it would stretch to England, Spain and Portugal, and from Maine to Florida. It would be the tragedy of Japan multiplied many times with no fewer than twenty-two million estimated casualties in the United States and Canada alone.
The terrorists hadn’t said what they wanted in concrete terms, just the hell that would be unleashed if a rescue attempt was initiated for the hostages. The tidal-wave plan had been discovered by Stony Man Farm only after hours of intensive search to identify the island’s tactical or strategic value. Nothing else could have motivated such a hostile takeover.
All of this data had come in the form of a white paper that postulated the deadly tsunami. Written by the Jeopardy Corporation, the paper was discovered by Hal Brognola, the Farm’s director and White House liaison. Brognola had the job of giving the President the vital news about the actual purpose behind the takeover. Now, the leader of the free world faced two problems, balancing the lives of thousands of tourists, many of them American, against the lives of millions of Europeans
