Kitabı oku: «Unified Action», sayfa 4

Wethers made connections, he found links, he built bridges one binary bit at a time between data streams until scrambled mosaics became crystal-clear pictures. In his usual understated way, he had made another connection.

“Bear?” Wethers asked over one bony shoulder.

From beside the bubbling coffeepot where he was assembling a table of organizational equipment for the field teams Kurtzman looked up. “Go ahead, Hunt,” he growled. “You got something?”

“I have a rather odd connection between what our teams are doing,” Wethers answered.

Curiosity piqued, Kurtzman maneuvered his wheelchair out from behind his desk and toward the former college professor. “Between the Caribbean and central Asia? A connection? Do tell.”

“Could be a fluke,” Wethers warned. “One of those odd coincidences people use to justify a belief in fate.”

Kurtzman rolled up next to him and grunted. “No such thing as coincidences in our world. What do you have?”

“Our missing FBI agent in Santo Domingo and our missing contractor in Kyrgyzstan?”

“Okay?”

“They’re brothers.”

Carmen Delahunt burst into the room through the door leading to the communications center. “We’ve got a problem,” she said without preamble. “We just lost our uplink with Phoenix.”

“Weather?” Kurtzman asked.

“Weather shouldn’t have been a problem. I ran a forensic diagnostic on the signal and I got shadow chatter in the low-end megahertz range.”

“Crap,” Kurtzman swore.

“High-end jammers,” Wethers agreed.

Kyrgyzstan

MCCARTER MOVED IN a crouch through the graveyard. Behind him three other members of Phoenix Force were spread out in a loose wedge formation, weapons up. Above them, hidden on the ridge, Hawkins tracked their progress from a sniper overwatch position.

McCarter dodged in and out of headstones, skirting graves torn open by artillery rounds. He averted his gaze from mummified husks of old corpses and tried not step on any of the skeletal remains that lay scattered like children’s toys. Rafael Encizo muttered something low and in Spanish under his breath as his foot came down in a spot of a decomposing corpse.

In five minutes everything had gone to shit.

The high-altitude wind had stacked eastern storm clouds up on the elevated geography behind them and a cold rain had begun to fall. In the same instant contact with their communication satellite had vanished. Then as they made their initial approach into the village they had realized a battle had just occurred within the small populated area.

They were now operating blindly in an extremely hazardous environment. The thought of abandoning the mission had never been discussed. There was still a hostage out there in the middle of this mess.

The falling rain was a blanket of white noise. The Phoenix Force warriors remained ghostly figures as they traversed the cemetery. The weight of their weapons were reassuring in their hands. They breathed in the humid air, feeding their bodies through the exertion.

The first rifle crack was muted and distant. McCarter went down to one knee behind a headstone. Instantly, James did the same, followed by Manning and Encizo.

The Briton strained his ears against the muffling effect of the heavy rain. He heard another single shot of rifle caliber. A burst of submachine gun fire answered it, and McCarter saw the flash of muzzle fire flare out of the dark rectangle of a window in the second story of a compound ahead of them.

McCarter quickly ascertained that none of the fire was being directed toward their position.

“What the hell is going on?”

“Internal coup for command?” James offered in a whisper. “Could be a blood feud, I guess. Everything is tribal politics this far up in the mountains.”

McCarter nodded. “Let’s try to use the chaos to our advantage.”

They were about fifty yards from the edge of the settlement where thatch and mud hovels surrounded the more built-up areas in a loose ring broken by animal pens. McCarter wiped rain water out of his eyes and looked toward the irrigation ditch that had been his original infiltration route.

He scowled. He wasn’t bursting with anticipation to slide into the muddy, waist-deep water of the ditch. Another burst of submachine gun fire came from the compound’s second story and was answered by two controlled single shots.

He rose from behind the headstone and began moving toward the village proper. Behind him his teammates rose and followed, keeping their formation loose and broken but still maintaining overlapping fields of fire.

The team dodged the open graves, artillery craters and headstones like runners navigating hurdles on the quarter-mile track. The soaked ground swallowed up the impact of their footsteps, spraying water with every step they took.

McCarter reached the round wall of a mud hovel and went around one side of it. He peeked out and saw an unpaved alley running deeper into the village. Bullet holes riddled the wall of one long, low, mud-brick building. A mongrel lay, shot dead, in the weeds beside it.

“I’m going to move forward then wave you up once it’s clear,” he instructed James. The ex-SEAL nodded as Encizo and Manning took up defensive positions to secure the Briton’s infiltration.

McCarter pushed forward. The alley ran past the back of the compound several blocks up. Trash bins lay overturned in the muddy street and rubbish was heaped everywhere. McCarter stayed close to one side of the building and edged his way carefully into the street. His eyes squinted against the rain, searching windows and doorways for any sign of movement.

There was no more gunfire. The rain was even louder adjacent to the structures of the village. It hammered onto shanty roofs of corrugated tin and ran off into makeshift gutters, forming rushing waterfalls that splashed out into the street every few yards. McCarter wiped water from his eyes and stalked farther into the tangle of dank and twisting streets.

He crossed an open area between two one-story buildings and sensed motion. He spun, bringing up his carbine. A black-and-white goat on the end of a frayed rope looked up and bleated at him. The little animal’s fur was matted down with exposure to the rain. There was a little hutch built behind the staked goat. From the doorway of the hutch a slender arm and hand sprawled in the mud. There was a bracelet of hammered metal around the delicate wrist and the fingers had frozen in rigor mortis.

McCarter looked up the street in both directions but saw nothing. He crouched and reached across with his left hand to his right boot and pulled a Gerber Guardian straight blade from his boot sheath. He stepped into the pen, ignoring the squish of mud and shit in the straw under his feet.

The animal bleated again and McCarter shushed it reflexively. He reached down and slid the double-edged blade into the loop of twine around the animal’s neck. He flicked his wrist and severed the rope. The goat walked to the edge of the pen and began munching on the straw that had been out of its reach before.

McCarter slowly sank to one knee. He slid the Gerber back into its boot sheath and bent forward, looking into the hutch. The shadows were deep in the tiny space. He saw the arm running back into the dark. McCarter blinked and the shadow resolved into the shape of a woman.

She was young and dead, with opaque eyes staring out at him. There was a bloody open gash in her forehead where a bullet had punched in. He looked away.

McCarter rose slowly out of his crouch. He heard a man call out several streets over and he froze. The language was French. Someone farther out from that answered him in the same language. Anger made McCarter grit his teeth. He swallowed a lump of bile that had formed like a rock in his throat.

Despite his anger he was more concerned by the mystery of the European voice. He had to keep his mind on the operation, focus his thoughts.

The men who had murdered this woman were human, just like him. They were killers, just like him. But they were nothing like him, nor he anything like them. To reduce violence to an evil unto itself, without regard to the circumstances that spawned it, was a philosophical arrogance McCarter could not stomach.

Securing his grip on the butt of his pistol, he walked over to the edge of the animal pen between the two houses and looked out into the narrow street. The incessant rain dimpled the puddles with the weight of its falling drops. He opened a little gate and stepped out into the street, leaving it open behind him.

He crouched, turned and made eye contact with James, who nodded. As his Phoenix Force colleagues shuffled forward behind him he hunted the darkness for unfamiliar shapes. The team had stumbled onto the middle of something, he knew, and he needed to get a handle on it and fast.

Once Phoenix Force was in position he began to move toward the compound, walking quickly with his weapon ready. He reached the edge of a round, one-story silo and looked carefully around it. A short passageway between buildings linked the main street with the secondary alley McCarter now navigated.

About twenty yards down a man stood with his back to McCarter. The ex–SAS commando narrowed his eyes in suspicion. The man wasn’t dressed like a rough mountain tribesman. He wore a night suit bristling with all the paraphernalia and accoutrements of the modern special-operations soldier. For some reason only night-vision goggles were missing.

McCarter lifted his carbine in a slow, smooth gesture. He straightened his arm and placed the sights squarely on the occipital lobe of the terrorist soldier’s skull. His finger curled around the trigger of the carbine and took up the slack.

The combatant looked to his left and lifted a fist above his head in some prearranged signal. McCarter shuffled sideways across the narrow mouth of the alley, his weapon tracking the man’s back with every step as he moved.

Once on the other side of the alleyway, McCarter slid around a corner and put his back against the wall and turned his face back toward the dirt lane he had just crossed. He drew the Beretta 92-F in an even, deliberate motion. He held the pistol up so that the muzzle was poised beside the hard plane of his cheek bone. He bent slightly at the knee and crouched before risking a glance around the edge of the building.

He looked over to where James was crouched motionless behind cover. He put a finger to his lips in a pantomime for quiet then pointed at his own eyes and at the European operative. James nodded once.

McCarter prepared for his kill.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Dominican Republic

The sawmill squatted on the banks of the Ozama River. Silent as a mausoleum, the building stood surrounded by warehouses and industrial structures now fallen dark, or burned to rubble in the wake of successive riots and civil unrest. Rain fell, dirty gray from the sky.

Rosario Blancanales drew his mouth into a tight line. He scanned the building and the area around it through his night-vision goggles, searching for telltale smeary silhouettes in the monochromatic green of the high-tech device. He saw nothing. The sounds of traffic came to him from the other areas of the city, muted across the distance. Close by, his ears detected only the whisper of cold wind skipping across the polluted river.

Outfitted from the cache at the safehouse, Able Team had arrived at the meeting set up by the missing FBI agent.

Next to the Puerto Rican Special Forces veteran, Lyons scrutinized the building, determining his approach. To the rear of the building loading docks with big roll-up bay doors sat shut and locked.

On the side of the building closest to him stood a maintenance door set on a short flight of concrete steps. Off in the distance, Lyons heard the soft thump-thump of a relief agency helicopter cruising low over the city.

Lyons again scanned the area through his goggles.

Santo Domingo was a city locked down under martial law, threatened by civil unrest and criminal gangs threatening to overrun their squalid ghettos. Police units patrolled in armored personnel carriers, and army checkpoints secured every major road and highway leading into the city.

Able Team had taken a grave risk by going armed into the streets of a supposedly allied nation dealing with the threat of a violent insurrection. An insurrection with increasingly apparent ties to the worldwide narcotics syndicates. Moving incognito had proved nearly impossible.

Lyons moved forward, scrambling out of the empty drainage ditch running parallel to the abandoned sawmill’s main building. He approached a chain-link fence and dropped down, removing wire cutters from his combat harness. With deft, practiced movements Lyons snipped an opening and bent back one edge.

Blancanales held the wire up while Schwarz remained outside the building to provide security and surveillance.

Lyons slid through head first and popped up on the other side. Blancanales crawled through and they began their approach. Traveling in a wide crescent designed to take them as far as possible from the silent street, Lyons approached the single maintenance entrance on the building’s side. He scanned the triple row of windows set above the building’s ground floor for any sign of movement. As he neared the building Lyons pulled a Glock 17 from his shoulder rig. The weapon had come from the safehouse armory but was not his first choice in handguns.

Lyons crab-walked up the short flight of concrete stairs leading to the door, clicking the selector switch off safety on his pistol as he moved. Behind him Blancanales tracked the muzzle of his own pistol through zones of fire.

Reaching the door, Lyons pulled a lock-pick gun from a cargo pocket and slid it expertly home into the lock as Blancanales maintained security.

The ex–LAPD detective squeezed the trigger on the lock device and heard the bolt securing the door snap back. Replacing the lock-pick gun, Lyons put a hand on the door, holding his 9 mm pistol up and ready. He looked over at Blancanales, who nodded wordlessly.

Before he moved, Lyons took a final scan of his surroundings. The industrial wasteland was eerily still. Taking a breath, he turned the handle and pulled open the door.

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

BARBARA PRICE CRADLED her phone next to her ear and took the clipboard and pen from the Farm’s head of security, a former Marine, Buck Greene. On the other end of the com link Hal Brognola queried Price further.

“There has to be more than that, Barb,” he said.

“I know, Hal,” she said into the phone. Signing the requisition form, she nodded once to Greene and handed the clipboard back. “We don’t have any other connection besides the fact that the two men were brothers. No other link. Just seems strange.”

“All right,” Brognola relented. “I’ll call the director and see if anything about the man’s brother came forward during the agent’s security background checks.”

“Great,” Price said. “When you get it, just shoot it to Delahunt on her email. We’ll feed it into Wethers’s search from there. I was thinking that for the brother to get his job as a civilian contractor flying those drones he had to have been in the military, right? Air Force or Army.”

Seeing where she was going, Brognola grunted his agreement. “Right. I’ll check to see if the other brother had some military time before joining the FBI. But how are we doing with commo for Phoenix Force?”

“We’re almost positive it’s a high-end electronics jammer, but whose, we can’t say yet. Bear’s working on trying to get a relay station from Bagram he can para-drop in to try to outboost the hostile signal.” Price paused. “No promises, though.”

“Fine. Keep me up to date and I’ll try to shake something loose on these two brothers for you.”

“Thanks, Hal,” she said, and hung up.

Price looked down at the cell in her hand and frowned. Both Phoenix Force and Able Team had been scrambled at the last minute on these operations, a situation ripe for intervention by that bastard Murphy and his immutable law. There had been no time for advance homework or advance preparations, and she prayed to heaven it wasn’t going to cost her the lives of her men in the field.

Dominican Republic

LYONS STEPPED THROUGH the black mouth of the open door and into the darkened interior of the building. He shuffled smoothly to one side and sank into a tight crouch, pistol up. Blancanales stepped through and let the door swing shut behind him. Lyons quickly scanned the hall in both directions. It was empty. Rising, he began moving down the corridor toward the rear of the building. Covering their rear, Blancanales followed.

The sawmill was oppressively still and quiet around them. The perimeter hallway ran the length of the structure, with doors leading to the building’s interior spaced at intervals along the inside wall. At the far end of the hallway Lyons could make out the heavy steel of a fire door that would open up onto stairs.

The intelligence of the building layout had been spotty. Aaron Kurtzman had been unable to pull up engineer blueprints during his rushed info search. All Lyons knew was that according to Smith’s contact the FBI agent was supposed to tag along with a minor street crook and the man’s bodyguards to a meet in an office suite on the second floor.

The sound of his breath loud in his own ears, Lyons entered the stairwell. He craned his neck, looking upward. Nothing moved on the stairs or crouched in the gloomy landings. He tracked his scanning vision with the muzzle of the Glock 17. The hair on the back of Lyons’s neck stood up like the hackles of a dog.

Blancanales put his shoulder at a right angle to the big ex-cop’s back, his own weapon up.

There was a smell of dust and disuse hanging heavy in the air. Faintly beneath that was the slight odor of machine oil coming up from the sawmill floor. Lyons’s straining ears detected only the beating of his own heart. He placed the reinforced soles of his boots carefully on the first metal rung of the building’s skeletal framed staircase and began to climb.

He edged around the curve of the stair, Blancanales right behind him. The raised grip of the pistol’s butt tight in his palm, he kept his Weaver stance tight, ready to react to the slightest motion. Smith’s contact was an established veteran of life as a hunted man. Security this apparently lax was inexplicable in such a man.

Reaching the second-floor landing, Lyons snuggled up tight against the fire door on that level as Blancanales took a position. He pressed his back against wall beside the door handle. The seal of the landing door was too tight for him to use a fiber optics surveillance cable bore scope. The heavy steel door effectively muted any potential sound coming from the second-floor hallway.

Gritting his teeth, Lyons nodded once and Blancanales pulled open the door. The ex-cop darted his head around the edge. He was met with silence and darkness. The hallway ran for several yards, office doors on one side, dark windows facing the parking lot on the other. The hall turned in a L-break at the far end toward the front of the building.

Lyons moved down the center of the hallway, ready to drop prone or respond with deadly fire at the slightest threat. Behind him Blancanales edged into the hallway, weapon up.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Kyrgyzstan

In the street a second black-clad European had joined his partner. This one held an ancient AKS submachine gun and together the two men jogged quickly up the alley toward McCarter’s position. McCarter ducked his head back around the edge of the building. He skipped several steps to the side and slid into the recessed arch of a doorway. The two combatants had now cut McCarter off from the rest of Phoenix Force.

As the men rounded the corner he could hear them talking to one another in low, excited voices. Both of them turned down the alley in the direction of the IMU compound and McCarter’s hiding spot.

McCarter stepped out of the doorway and into the rain and leveled his Beretta 92-F as the men stumbled up against each other in surprise at his sudden appearance. The pistol spit a single time even as McCarter extended his arm, and the terrorist holding the AKS went down. The rain had plastered the gunman’s shirt to his muscular frame, and McCarter could clearly see where the blunt round smashed into the prominent ridge of the man’s sternum and punched through it.

The terrorist fighter tripped over backward under the impact, going down. He dropped his submachine gun and it fell across his legs as he went down. Beside him the second SKS-armed terrorist struggled to bring his longer weapon to bear as McCarter swiveled at the hips and brought the Beretta around at point-blank range.

The man’s eyes were startlingly white as they bulged outward in his terror. The two men were so close McCarter could see the yellowing of the man’s sclera and the bright red blood vessels in the eye there. McCarter’s round powered through his face at the bridge of the nose with a loud smack that sounded wet and sharp even in the falling rain.

The yellow-tinged eyes rolled up backward in his face and the man sagged into the mud. His weapon dropped from limp fingers and fell to the ground. The combatant crumpled over and dropped face-first into the muck.

Even as the second gunmen fell, McCarter spun, weapon ready and tracking for any witnesses to the executions. He heard no alarm, saw no movement and took no fire. He quickly lowered his gun and went to one knee in the muck where the corpses were pouring blood from their ragged wounds.

James raced over and reached down with his left hand, snatching one of the dead men up by his shirt collar. He dragged the body over to the edge of the narrow street and laid him against the lee of the building before quickly returning to the center of the alley to retrieve the second gunman. While McCarter guarded his actions on one side, Encizo and Manning took the other. He hauled the limp corpse over and placed it beside its brother against the building.

James looked around. Seeing what he wanted, he looped the AKM over one shoulder and grabbed up several overturned trash bins. Without preamble he covered the bodies with soggy garbage and then placed the empty cans over them. The camouflage would only withstand the most rudimentary of inspections, but he hoped that anyone simply looking down the alley in the rain and dark would miss the bodies.

McCarter took the AKS into his hands and began to jog down the alley in the direction of the compound.

THE COMPOUND FORMED one side of the center of the Kyrgyzstan village. On the other side of the compound was the walled mosque of mud brick and the accompanying madrassa, or religious school. A long, low building had a Kyrgyzstan flag hanging limply and either side of the street on the fourth side of the village square was taken up by the most prosperous of the village stockyard vendors.

The Phoenix warriors moved forward, suspicious at the absence of civilian locals moving around in response to the gunfire. The corpses of the Europeans had provided little intelligence.

McCarter peeked around the back of a combination gas station and mechanic’s garage. The station bore the logo of a Russian company, which was unsurprising given the company’s dominance in the region, most especially in nearby former Soviet republics.

During McCarter’s approach more sporadic gunfire had sounded, triggering another burst from the compound’s second floor. The team moved carefully toward the garage positioned beside the compound across from the mosque. A mess of fifty-five-gallon oil drums had been placed haphazardly in back of the building and McCarter wound his way into these as he approached the structure.

Rainwater shimmered in oily rainbows on the lids of the barrels and they felt greasy under his touch. A dim yellow bulb burned above the back door to the garage. The door sagged on its ancient hinges and its paint peeled badly. The knob was burnished metal that looked slick from the continuous rainfall.

McCarter carefully wound his way through the barrels and toward the door. Manning sank to one knee and brought his heavy machine gun up to cover their rear approach as Encizo and James fanned out. Somewhere on the elevation beyond the village boundary Hawkins tracked their progress through his sniper scope.

As he moved, the Phoenix Force leader constantly reevaluated his understanding of the situation. Such analytical skills had been the margin between life and death for McCarter many times in the past. The IMU terrorists had taken over control of the village and used it as a staging area for their operations. Now a force of European commandos had entered the village and initiated hostilities.

McCarter doubted the Europeans were government agents on some related mission of counterterror or hostage rescue. There were no supporting helicopters or other aircraft. Such a frontal assault seemed far more likely to get a hostage executed than rescued. Rather, what they had witnessed so far had all the hallmarks of a frontal infantry attack designed for pure attrition.

McCarter could find no good reason for why Europeans would want to capture and hold an extremist village in the central Asian mountain. It was unsurprising that IMU security formations inside the village amounted to little more than a well-armed street gang. What was strange was the complete lack of evidence of Kyrgyzstan national forces other than the craters left by artillery rounds. Had the regional commander completely abdicated control to tribal elements?

A burst of fire erupted from inside the garage. The sound of a Kalashnikov firing was unmistakable to McCarter. A flurry of rounds struck the wall along the second story of the compound. Bullets tore into the clay-brick structure already tattooed with the scars of weapons fire. A window was shattered and glass tinkled.

Come on, McCarter thought. He signaled Encizo.

The Cuban rose out of his crouch behind the oil barrel and began jogging across the short distance to the back door. The submachine gun was up and held tight in his fists. A short burst of submachine gun fire lashed out from the compound in answer and raked the side of the building.

As the rounds struck the garage Encizo ran up and kicked the flimsy door off its moorings. The door exploded inward off its hinges, splintering under the impact of the combat diver’s big boot tread. Leading with his AKS submachine gun, he burst into the building.

A 1980s red Toyota hatchback was up on the racks above a service pit. Its windows were busted out and its frame riddled with stray machine-gun fire. Encizo ducked down underneath the raised vehicle to get a better look inside the unlit garage bay.

He saw two men hunkered down behind the concrete walls on either side of a bullet-riddled service bay door. They spun, bringing up AKM assault rifles as he burst in on them. Their expressions were almost comically startled.

McCarter raked them both with ComBloc rounds from the Soviet submachine gun. He stitched a line of slugs across one terrorist gunman’s chest.

The racket of his firing was deafening in the confined space of the room. Shell casings arched out of the weapon’s oversize ejection port and spilled across the floor. They bounced across the oil-stained concrete and rolled into the open mouth of the service pit under the red Toyota. The muzzle on the submachine climbed with the recoil of Encizo’s continuous blasts, and the tail end of his burst buried four slugs in the second terrorist fighter’s head.

James came in through the shattered doorway and curled around the jamb to cover Encizo’s entry. A wild tribesman with an AKM was running forward, trying to get a bead on the attacking Encizo. James’s subgun rattled in his hands and the man went down hard. The gloom was so deep in the room that each burst of automatic gunfire lit up the room like a strobe light, casting weird shadows across bullet-pocked walls and the dimpled metal body of the red Toyota.

The terrorist’s skull bounced crudely off the wall, leaving a smear of crimson syrup and gray brain matter clinging to the wall as he slid down. Encizo eased up on the trigger of the subgun and turned the weapon back on the first terrorist. Blood leaked out of his slack mouth and trickled down both sides of his chin.

James fired a neat 3-round burst into him then turned and repeated the procedure with the second terrorist. A glass bottle half full of grain alcohol slid out of the dead man’s hand and rattled on the floor. Liquor rushed out of the bottle and mixed with the growing pools of red.

The stink of burned cordite filled James’s nose. Smoke trailed up from the muzzle of the submachine gun as beside him Encizo shifted his eyes around the room.

Outside in the street they heard Manning suddenly open up with his machine gun.

Dominican Republic

BLANCANALES MOVED as silently as his considerable skills allowed, but to his own adrenaline-enhanced ears, his footfalls echoed loudly. Just in front of him, reaching the bend in the hallway, Lyons took a rapid look around the corner. Along this stretch, doorways marked both sides of the hall at intermittent lengths.

Halfway down the hallway he picked out a crumpled form through his night-vision goggles. From the green smear under the still shape, Lyons could tell the figure had lost a lot of blood, and recently, as the signature still held a good amount of heat. Instinctively, Lyons snapped his line of sight upward, scanning the corridor for any sign of movement. Seeing none, Lyons slid around the corner and into the passage, Blancanales creeping along behind him.