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Dominican Republic

Able Team was a direct-action unit that identified its targets and went forward until enemy combatants had been neutralized in one fashion or another. Capable of stealth and subterfuge, the team was a trio of extremely fit, extremely confident special operators used to sizing up all manner of opposition—soldiers, police, criminals and spies. It wasn’t hard to identify the hard-eyed Carl Lyons and more laconic features of Rosario Blancanales and Hermann Schwarz as experienced ass kickers.

The sun was low in the sky, radiating heat like a flamethrower, and the humidity was so thick it felt like a hanging curtain as Able Team approached the customs police in a loose triangle with Lyons at the front.

Recognizing the potential for trouble, the four guards dropped hands to the grips of weapons and stiffened their posture. The leader of the group, an extremely dark-skinned islander with a seemingly fleshless skull, threw a half-smoked cigarette to the ground and let it smolder.

As the three Stony Man operatives approached, Blancanales and Schwarz drifted out a few steps to the side, turning their approach wedge in a softly enveloping semicircle that kept the bodies of the customs officers trapped between themselves and the frame of their vehicle.

Sensing trouble but seeing no weapons, the officer took a step forward and opened his mouth to bark an order.

Lyons lifted up a meaty fist and snapped it forward down his center line in an old-school karate punch. The first two knuckles of his fist slammed into the custom officer’s chin, his jaw hanging loose as he prepared to speak. The hinge joint where the jawbone joined the skull was rammed backward, mauling the nerves centered there. The officer went down like a pole-axed steer in a Chicago stockyard, instantly unconscious.

Hermann Schwarz moved in close to his target, his limbs tracing predetermined combative patterns. His left hand slapped the barrel of his man’s weapon to one side, his right hand snapping once in a short jab to the man’s solar plexus that doubled him over, followed by a hook that took the man flush along his temple and dropped him instantly.

On the opposite side of Lyons from Schwarz, ex–Special Forces soldier Rosario Blancanales hammered into his own opponent. The Puerto Rican commando slammed his left hand against the forestock of the man’s rifle, pushing it hard into the startled Dominican’s chest and trapping it against the torso.

Caught by surprise, the man’s first instinct was to clutch his weapon even more tightly, slowing his response to the attack. Immediately, Blancanales snapped the edge of his right hand into the side of the Dominican’s neck, striking the officer along his carotid sinus. The man’s eyes rolled upward until only whites showed and he crumpled to the ground at his feet.

The final officer had time to swing a clumsy over-hand buttstroke toward Lyons, who deflected it with the palm of his hand before catching the overmatched soldier on the angle of his chin with a powerful boxer’s hook that dropped him.

“Let’s go,” Lyons snapped, jumping to work.

Quickly they used the downed men’s own handcuffs to secure them before stripping weapons, a cell phone, vehicle ignition keys and an ancient Motorola handheld walkie-talkie from the checkpoint officers.

“Do you think three white dudes in a government-marked jeep will be suspicious?” Schwarz asked, voice wry, as he fired up the vehicle.

“Speak for yourself, Mr. White Guy,” Blancanales said as he jumped in the back seat and pushed the police weapons out of obvious sight.

“Just try to look official until we can get a different ride,” Lyons said.

Schwarz pushed the accelerator down and gunned the jeep down the asphalt service road running behind the airport and toward Santo Domingo. Beside him Lyons was using thick fingers to triangulate a GPS-guided route on the screen of his CPDA.

Ahead of them a line of aluminum-and-clapboard shanties formed a labyrinthine barrier on the outskirts of the town. Beyond this ramshackle slum in the more built-up areas of the city, columns of brown-and-black smoke rose and the wail of sirens could be easily picked out, punctuated by the sharp reports of gunfire. Forming a backdrop to this was an audible sound of the rioting mobs forming a sort of human white noise that underlined and overlaid everything else.

Santo Domingo was a city on fire.

Working on his navigational program, Lyons snarled in disgust and shoved the CPDA away. “The damn thing only wants to give me obvious thoroughfare,” he explained, voice terse with frustration. “We roll down main avenues and we’re going to hit crowds and riot police every fifty fucking yards.”

“Oh, now you don’t want to be obvious?” Blancanales called out from the back seat.

Schwarz reached the end of the service lane and swerved off onto a side road to avoid running into any official traffic working checkpoints or coming from the opposite direction.

He swerved to avoid a stray dog and ran the vehicle through a rut into a long shallow puddle of polluted ditch water. They entered a winding street of the shanty slum and were immediately forced to slow because of the people milling around. Though not rioting, this group of citizens was clearly anxious about the situation and crowded the sides of the street.

A sea of dark faces turned in surprise toward the three men in the jeep. Dogs barked as bystanders pointed with open curiosity at the sight. Other vehicles, freight trucks, minibikes and taxis, began to clog the road, slowing Schwarz’s speed.

Lyons mulled over his situation as Schwarz expertly guided the vehicle through the narrow twisting lanes. Groups of young males, some openly carrying machetes, began to appear on street corners.

“We’ve still got five miles to go to the docks,” Blancanales pointed out. “We’re going to be playing Russian roulette in a couple of minutes once we get into the industrial and merchant areas,” Blancanales continued. “I don’t mind putting a couple of this regime’s bully boys to sleep to get a ride, but I don’t think a gun battle is going to be productive.”

“I’m open to suggestions,” Lyons said, hooded eyes watching the crowds and vehicles for any sign of a threat.

“Why don’t we take a taxi?” Schwarz offered.

“We don’t have any cash and I didn’t think to rob those clowns from the airport,” Lyons replied.

“We barter?”

“What? Not weapons?” Lyons demanded.

“Why not? You said it yourself—we either do what we have to do to save the American or we go home now. We’ve been put in an imperfect situation. We can either keep a moral high ground or, you know, actually succeed at the goddamn mission.”

“We got a cell phone,” Blancanales leaned forward and pointed out. “I can use that and the lead officer’s pistol to get us a ride, I think. If you want, I can use my pocket knife to juke the fire pin so that it looks all right but will snap when fired.”

“I doubt they’ll even look as long as there are bullets in the clip,” Schwarz argued. “If you want we could just toss the recoil spring altogether. No harm no foul…sort of.” He grinned through his mustache.

Lyons nodded once. “Let’s do it.”

Within half a block of deciding to act, Blancanales had expertly sabotaged the 9 mm pistol. When they found a driver in a battered silver Kia Sophia taxi three minutes later, Blancanales was forced to add the keys to the jeep into the mix but Able Team had secured a driver.

They quickly pulled down a narrow dirt lane overhung with laundry and the curious eyes of the slum’s inhabitants. Using their own lightweight jackets as makeshift covers for their longer weapons, Able Team left the government jeep behind and piled into the cramped confines of the taxi.

The driver was in his sixties, scar-faced, with arthritis-gnarled hands and flawless British-accented English. The man watched his passengers with a wary eye but quickly navigated the car away from the scene.

Within seconds Able Team was driving into the heart of an urban firestorm of riots and military police units.

Kyrgyzstan

ABOVE THE CENTRAL ASIAN HILLS clouds began to form, casting dark shadows on the already dark terrain. On the ridgeline above the narrow mountain road Phoenix Force lay in wait, five ambush predators waiting for their quarry.

Weapon muzzles tracked the approach as gleaming headlights appeared on the twisting road. The engines snarled as the vehicle operators ground the gears up the steep grade.

Watching through his night-vision goggles, McCarter felt a professional satisfaction as he surveyed his ambush site. It was a perfect amalgamation of satellite imagery and tactical experience. It was a lethal kill box.

The operation was designed to neutralize an informational node terrorist cell propagating chaos and unrest in underdeveloped and weak countries. The traveling team were graduates of al Qaeda training camps in the former Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. The command-and-control instructors educated local radicals in logistics, administration, financing and target selection, ruthlessly turning clumsy, disorganized gangs of killers into streamlined, corporate models of murderous efficiency.

Phoenix Force was about to execute their own lessons in murderous efficiency.

“Wait for my call,” McCarter said smoothly. “On my call, strike our predetermined targets.”

“Copy,” Hawkins answered.

“Copy,” Encizo acknowledged.

“Copy,” James echoed.

“Copy,” Manning finished.

Below the ex–SAS commando the terrorist convoy ground past. He watched the scout vehicles crawl past his position, close enough now to see the glow of the occupants’ cigarettes. Fifty yards down the line, the last truck brought up the rear. The convoy commander had allowed the rough terrain to cause his drivers to bunch up too closely together.

It was a fundamental mistake McCarter intended to exploit.

Slowly, McCarter lifted the butt of his AKS and nestled it into his shoulder. His trigger hand found the curve of his 30-round magazine and his finger lay on the smooth metal curve of the M 203’s trigger as his free hand grasped the grenade launcher by its grooved tube.

To either side of him he could feel the men of his unit tensed and poised for his command, ready to unleash a heavy curtain of hellfire on the terrorists below him. He moved his boot slightly and dislodged a stone.

The pebble slid free of the initial lip of the ledge and slid downhill, dislodging a miniature avalanche of gravel that petered out halfway down the incline grade. McCarter let the pent-up air in his lungs escape in a slow hiss as he squeezed his trigger.

The recoil of the shot rocked his carbine back into his shoulder as the round discharged with its signature bloop sound. As the first-strike signal, McCarter had reserved the right to call his target on site instead of taking an assigned target as they’d discussed in their mission workup.

Due to the heavy firepower potential of the 20 mm antiaircraft gun in the last truck, he made the decision to put his first HEDP into it. With surprise, aggression of action, command of terrain and superior training Phoenix Force held the upper hand in the conventional military ambush. If there was any possible game changer then it was the heavy weapon serving as the convoy tail gun.

His round arched into the night, its velocity low enough that he could just trace the arc of its movement as it sailed out across the length of a soccer field toward the truck.

In the next instant there was a flash of light, followed by the thump of the HE round going off. Then men started screaming as fire rolled up in a brilliant orange ball toward the sky and the battle began.

Keyed to the actions of their team leader, both Calvin James and Rafael Encizo reacted instantly, triggering their RPG-7s within breaths of each other. The twin warheads streaked out from the overhang in flashes of ignition fire on traverses almost 180 degrees apart. Encizo fired his round toward the hood and cab of the rear truck already struck by McCarter’s 40 mm round, while James angled his into the undercarriage of the lead pickup.

The RPG rounds struck the convoy almost simultaneously. The rockets hammered home with ruthless force. James’s round was an inch low and struck the hard gravel road exactly between the front and rear driver’s-side tires. The round detonated, spreading a lethal umbrella of shrapnel and flame that first shredded then ignited the vehicle’s fuel tank.

The secondary explosion was massive, picking up the light sports utility vehicle and its armed tribesmen and flipping them upside down in a bonfire of orange flame and roiling black smoke. Bodies spun like pinwheels as limbs were ripped free and thrown next to scorched torsos.

Encizo’s round cut across the distance at a sharp angle with a screaming, swooshing sound as distinct as any human voice. The rocket skipped off the angled hood of the old Soviet-era truck and skimmed into the windshield. Flames shot out the truck cab through windows in all four directions.

The expanding concussion wave of the exploding RPG warhead ripped back through the dash and hammered into the truck’s massive engine block, igniting the vehicle’s fluids.

With two well-placed applications of ballistic high explosives, Phoenix Force had effectively pinned the convoy in place on the narrow mountain road. The remaining terrorist troops were left with nowhere to run, no where to escape, and the surrounding terrain made a counterattack virtually impossible.

Manning opened up with his RPK, the weapon hammering out a long burst of 7.62 mm ComBloc rounds that he stitched down the exposed side of the trapped vehicles from one burning truck to the next. His rounds perforated the thin metal of the light-skinned trucks, hammering out divots and burrowing into scrambling, screaming, frantic flesh. His burst broke bones, opened wounds and split skulls as the hapless terrorists twisted and danced under the withering fire.

On the opposite end of the spectrum Hawkins turned his sniper optics on, the nighttime target range as brilliantly lit as a summer day in his home state of Texas. He fired, rode the recoil, adjusted his aim and fired again with an industrial efficiency so smooth it was almost appalling.

First he killed the drivers, then he allowed himself the luxury of picking out a diversity of targets, even killing a struggling terrorist for no other reason than to spare the burning man an agonizing death. Once he saw a terrified and panicked gray-bearded elder desperately attempting to work the buttons on his sat phone. Hawkins used the 4-power magnification of his PSO-1 telescopic sight to put a single 7.62 mm round from his Dragunov SVD through the man’s thick, low forehead.

Blood rushed like a river from a cracked dam as the man crumpled and fell away, his satellite phone dropping to the ground from lifeless fingers.

“On ropes!” McCarter shouted.

Both Encizo and James fired their second volley and Phoenix Force prepared to launch its final assault on the convoy.