Shadow War

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He turned his gaze forward again. A thick hedge of arborvitaes formed a wall at the rear of the parking lot. He cut his eyes toward Hawkins, then back toward the wall of foliage. He never slowed.

The bucking of the vehicle as it hit the curb rattled their teeth hard. Then the heavy bumper struck the arborvitaes like a battering ram and the Hummer slammed through and out the other side.

For a second McCarter couldn’t see anything but the rubbery, fanlike needled leaves. The Hummer hurtled through a shoulder-high fence of 4x4 planks and turned them into splintered kindling.

Then there was nothing.

The Hummer hovered for a moment out into open space and Hawkins had an absurd, momentary flashback to his childhood and the television show The Dukes of Hazard. The Hummer tilted as they hovered and they could see the lights of the city plunging down the steep hill below them.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Jack Grimaldi put the nose down of the Scout Defender helicopter and ran for the open water, putting the devastation of the forgotten New Orleans ward behind Able Team like a bad dream.

Below them roads stretched out in geometric patterns like gray scars on black skin. The mounds of rubble stretched out, then gave way before a wall of trees that delineated urban buildup from bayou as sharply as a fortress wall.

In the cramped space of the cargo bay, Gadgets Schwarz and Carl Lyons worked feverishly to keep Blancanales alive. The former Black Beret had often served as the primary team medic, but all of Stony Man’s attention had received combat medic training. They may not have been as skilled as James, or even as skilled as Blancanales, but they knew enough to keep a man alive during a rapid transport. They hoped.

Schwarz tore the stethoscope from his ears and let the air bleed out of the blood pressure cuff he had wrapped around his unconscious teammate’s arm. He looked over at Lyons.

“Pulse racing, BP dropping,” Schwarz said. “Narrowing pulse pressure—he’s at ninety-eight over ninety.”

Lyons nodded, his face grim. “His heart’s beating faster to try to compensate for lack of volume in his blood vessels because he’s bleeding out so fast. The increased heart rate is dumping more blood out to bleed internally so it’s a vicious cycle. If he doesn’t get under a knife soon he’s done, Gadgets.”

“IVs?” Schwarz asked.

“Yeah.” Lyons nodded. “All we can do is try to slam enough volume in there to keep his heart from running dry and seizing into cardiac arrest.”

Schwarz was already pulling 1000 ml bags of clear saline solution from the medic box set in the bulkhead of the helicopter. Lyons snapped some latex tubing around Blancanales’s arm to try to get a vein to rise.

“Jesus, I can see his abdomen filling up with blood,” Gonzales muttered. “It looks like a balloon.”

“Shut up. Don’t speak unless spoken to,” Lyons growled. Then he turned and looked at the Mexican informant. “I know you’re hurting, buddy. That’s one nasty gash. You’ve got to put pressure on it, understand? Get the dressings out of the kit at your feet. We didn’t save you to have you bleed out on the way home.”

Gonzales nodded, and Lyons could see the man was edging into shock. He kept an eye on the Mexican as he prepped the emergency medical equipment he was using on Blancanales. The man’s hands were shaking as he applied the pressure dressing to the ragged, seeping wound in his leg.

The aqua-green light of the tactical bulbs inside the cargo bay cast the huddled men in the same, strange quasi-illumination as night-vision goggles.

The Able Team leader secured the needle into a vein on the inside of Blancanales’s arm, then ran the tubing out and spiked it into the bottom of the saline bag held by Schwarz. Schwarz had another 1000 ml bag dangling between his teeth, and he promptly began to squeeze the bag Lyons had just hooked up, forcing fluid into Blancanales’s leaking vascular system.

Lyons shifted position and began to start an IV in his friend’s other arm. He repeated the process with methodical, almost automatic efficiency. Blancanales would die if he screwed up.

He might die anyway.

Lyons spiked the second bag and gently squeezed, pushing the liquid out. He looked down at the face of his unconscious teammate, and in the uncertain light of the helicopter cargo bay the veteran’s skin was ashen gray.

Schwarz looked out through the windows and saw tangled delta bayou give way to the black waters over the coast. He turned his head and called out to Jack Grimaldi in the pilot’s seat.

“We close?” Schwarz yelled.

“How’s he doing?” Grimaldi shouted back.

“Not very good, Jack!” Schwarz answered.

“Then we’re nowhere near close enough,” Grimaldi replied.

“I KNOW ,” P RICE SAID . Her voice was flat, emotionless. “I understand, Jack. This is part of the game.” Steel threaded itself into her voice. “I understand how bad he is. I have a flight medic crew with the 160th Special Operations Wing coming to meet you at the rendezvous. They have a flight surgeon, two flight nurses and a paramedic. They’ll get him to the secure wing of Bethesda Naval Hospital.”

She stopped talking and dots of color grew on her cheekbones. Sitting near her, Carmen Delahunt and Akira Tokaido quickly looked down at their computer screens. They could hear Grimaldi shouting into his com link through the speaker of Price’s encrypted sat phone.

“Can it!” Price snapped. “I know he could die. There is no way I can justify jeopardizing the Farm to risk you setting down at a civilian hospital. End of story! The NOPD is all over that warehouse now, and what do you think the survivors are telling them, Jack? You think a bunch of men-in-black can just show up at a major metropolitan trauma center and frighten an emergency room full of people and a surgical team into keeping quiet?”

Price lowered her voice and the emotional exhaustion was just as evident as her resolution. “Stony Man is more than just a single operative. You want to save him, you fly your ass off. Stony Base out.”

She clicked the end button and set the phone down. Her face was a flat affect as she turned toward her office. She heard the soft sounds of wheeled tires and turned as Aaron Kurtzman rolled toward her.

She managed a smile as she took another mug of coffee from his beefy hand. “You didn’t make this pot, did you?”

“Nah, you’re safe,” he replied. “Cowboy made it.” He paused, watching her take a sip of the strong brew. “Hal is en route to where Able Team is taking Gonzales.”

Price nodded. “You give him the rundown on Rosario?”

“I did.” Kurtzman looked her in the eye. “Just so you know, he concurs with your assessment about keeping Pol out of a civilian hospital.” He stopped. “Even if…” He let the sentence trail off.

“This is the world we live in,” Price said. “Rosario knows it better than anyone.”

Kurtzman nodded and Price turned away. She put a hand on Carmen Delahunt’s shoulder as she worked a computer screen, a headset over her red hair.

“What’s the word on Phoenix now?” Price asked.

“Unpleasant,” Delahunt answered. “They haven’t initiated communication since informing us they were forced to escape and evade the locals. They haven’t made contact with Charlie Mott at the rendezvous coordinates yet. I have no idea if they’re waterborne or still driving.”

Price turned toward Akira Tokaido, who had his ear-buds down around his neck for once. He was working two keyboards and muttering into the microphone of his own headset. His finger tapped the enter button on one of his keyboards and the screen of his G5 laptop began to scroll information.

“What’s the word on the local law-enforcement response for Phoenix?” Price asked.

Tokaido didn’t turn his head. His gaze jumped back and forth between his screens and his lips mouthed words. He struck the space bar with his thumb and the scrolling screen froze. First the encryption-decryption software translated the signal, identified the language and then routed it to the proper translation program. The result was a rolling screen that looked like a digitalized version of a court recorder’s transcript.

“They have three patrol cars on the pursuit now. They’ve called for backup and six more shift patrolmen have responded. They asked for a helicopter, but we caught a break, as the air unit was tied up with something else. The locals haven’t informed any other agency of the chase—so they must not realize Phoenix is going to go waterborne and exit the country.”

Tokaido looked up and smiled. “Apparently, David’s driving scares the hell out of them.”

“Well, it scares the hell out of me, too,” Price replied, her voice wry.

C ARL L YONS SET A BOTTLE of spring water in front of the silent Gabriel Gonzales. The informant looked grateful and snatched it up. He opened it and chugged down several long swallows. The special-operations medic had left only a few minutes before, leaving behind some white, oblong pills in a paper cup for Gonzales’s pain.

The medic, dressed in an OD green flight suit bereft of name tag or any identification markers, had done his primary survey, dressed the man’s wound, hooked up a slow IV drip to replace the blood loss and deemed him “fit for questioning” before leaving the pills.

Having obviously done this before, he addressed Lyons’s primary concern even before the ex-LAPD detective could ask it. “Don’t worry,” he said, after coming out of the room. “The pain meds won’t keep you from questioning him. They may, in fact, help him a little, loosen him up. He won’t be inebriated or too stoned to remember details.”

The man reached down and picked up his green canvas medic bag and left the building to where an unmarked Ford Explorer was waiting. At no point during his interaction had the medic asked who the hurt man was, or who Lyons and Schwarz were or who they worked for. He’d simply done what was required of him without unnecessary comment and then left. The hard-nosed Lyons was impressed, almost in spite of himself.

He watched Gonzales take his pills and then wash them down with the water. The informant sat in a straight-backed chair in front of a small metal table in a nondescript room. A black lamp with a flexible neck and a powerful bulb sat turned off on the table. There was a tablet of lined paper and a ballpoint pen on the table in front of the man.

Lyons reached over and turned on the lamp. Gonzales blinked against the sudden harsh illumination. Then the big ex-cop turned to where Schwarz was waiting beside the door, and nodded once. Schwarz reached over and turned off the overhead lights in the room.

Now the hard light of the lamp provided the only illumination in the room. It cast a sharp-edged white pool that plunged the rest of the room in deep shadow. Just beyond the reach of the lightbulb Lyons pulled up a chair and sat opposite Gonzales.

Behind him the door next to where Schwarz was standing swung open, revealing a dark hallway. Hal Brognola, his face cloaked in shadow, entered the room, closed the door behind him and took a seat against the wall.

“Gonzales. Excuse the setup,” Lyons said, his voice neutral. “It’s for your own protection.”

“Yeah, sure,” Gonzales replied. In his mind’s eye the Mexican informant was seeing the burly blond-headed man sitting across from him as he had been in the New Orleans warehouse—the automatic shotgun booming, Zetas bodies being thrown around by the impact of the 12-gauge rounds. “Where’s my handler?” he asked. “Where’s Hart?”

“You’ll see him in a bit,” Lyons replied. “He’s taking care of your wife and daughter. I know you’re worried about them, but they’re safe. We pulled you free of that warehouse, and my very good friend took a knife to the stomach to get you out. So, now, in return, you will fill us in on the missing pieces.”

“I don’t know much that I hadn’t already passed on to my handler,” Gonzales replied. “I only knew something big was coming. I thought it was a drug deal.”

“This Bellicose Dawn,” Brognola said.

He was a faceless voice in the shadows. Gonzales instinctively looked up toward the sound and was immediately blinded by the glare of the lamp. He held his hand up, blinked, then looked down. He nodded.

“I passed that much on,” he said. “Then I tried to find out more and somehow Lagos knew that information had gotten out. I was supposed to meet them for a dinner. I wound up hanging in that warehouse instead.”

“What’d you find out?” Lyons asked.

“I only know bits and pieces. It doesn’t make sense, but it doesn’t sound like a drug deal.” Gonzales paused and drank more water. “It sounds like an assault, an attack or something.”