Читать книгу Atomic Fracture - Don Pendleton - Страница 9

CHAPTER THREE

Carl “Ironman” Lyons raised his hands to cover his ears as soon as the first shot was fired. In his peripheral vision, he could see that John “Cowboy” Kissinger—Stony Man’s chief armorer—had done the same. Kissinger wanted to test some new weapons not just on the Stony Man firing range but under more realistic battlefield conditions, so had arranged for a visit to a “kill house” used by SWAT teams both local and federal.Covering their ears had been an instinctive reaction to the thunderous noise. Even coming from inside the enclosed walls of the kill house the outside effects of the explosions were painful. Not unlike synchronized swimmers, each man outside the house ensured their earplugs and coverings were secure before the next round was fired.

More shots exploded inside the walls and the Able Team leader pictured Rosario Blancanales—better known to his fellow Able Team members as “Politician” or simply “Pol”—making his way through the rooms of the practice range. The kill house had three levels and each room, hallway and staircase was equipped with “pop up” targets that featured good guys, bad guys, hostages and innocent bystanders—all of whom had to be shot or passed by with less than a second’s consideration by the brain.

More shots rang out. Now that his ears were covered, Lyons dropped his hands to his sides and moved quickly to where Kissinger stood, leaning against one of the pickups in which they had arrived. The Stony Man armorer held a laptop computer in front of him, and on the screen the Able Team leader could see the interior of the house. Blancanales was making his way cautiously up the steps to the second floor. In his hands was a Yankee Hill Machine Company’s Model 15.

A head and shoulders—then two arms holding an AK-47—suddenly appeared at the top of the steps and Blancanales fired one shot directly through the forehead. A ragged hole appeared in the paper face of a terrorist wearing a turban. Then the target disappeared as quickly as it had appeared.

Lyons continued to watch as Blancanales made his way through the rooms on the second and then third floor, carefully picking out the good guys from the bad and putting holes through the paper images of the enemy targets. The Able Team leader noted, however, that each time his fellow warrior pulled the trigger, he winced slightly.

The Yankee Hill Model 15’s short ten-inch barrel combined with powerful 6.8-caliber rounds, was loud even outside the facility. It had to be deafening for the man inside.

Almost as if he’d read Lyons’s thoughts, Blancanales suddenly stopped and turned around. On the screen, Lyons saw him flip the short-barreled carbine’s selector to the safe position. Then, the YHM held barrel down, the Able Team member retraced his steps and exited the building without completing the course.

As soon as Blancanales emerged, he shook his head in what looked like an attempt to clear the ringing in his ears, then walked swiftly toward the pickup where Lyons and Kissinger stood. Handing the YHM-15 to Kissinger, he said, “It shoots great. But if I’d finished the course I’d have been as deaf as my ninety-year-old grandfather.” He shook his head again. “Give me the standard M-16 A2 anytime.”

Kissinger smiled, and Lyons sensed that the armorer had anticipated just such a reaction. Turning, he set the YMH in the bed of the pickup. When his hands came back in sight, he held a similar-looking rifle. But this weapon bore a long tubular device on the end of the barrel and there was a small scope mounted in the top of the receiver.

“Try this one, Pol,” Kissinger said, extending the rifle in front of him. “I think you’ll find it a little gentler on the eardrums.”

Blancanales took the weapon and looked down at it. “Sound suppression,” he noted.

“Right,” Kissinger agreed. “And while you won’t be able to appreciate it fully here in the daylight, it cuts down considerably on the muzzle flash from the short barrel.”

Blancanales nodded. “I’ll go back and give it one shot,” he said. “But if it isn’t quiet enough...” His voice trailed off for a moment. “I’m not sacrificing my hearing for it.”

“I think you’ll be happy with it,” said Kissinger. “Yankee Hill’s making some with permanent suppressors. But I’ve altered several so you can take them off if you want to create noise and confusion.”

Blancanales lifted the rifle slightly in his hands. “Not much heavier than the unsuppressed model,” he said. “The suppressor titanium?”

Kissinger nodded. He cradled the laptop in his left arm long enough to hold his other fist to his mouth and cough. “Adds about eight inches to the barrel length. You put that on the end of the standard M-16 and you’ve got 22 to 24 inches beyond the receiver. That’s bumped the weapon up to sniper length—without sniper rifle accuracy.”

Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz, Able Team’s electronics expert, joined the group and studied the look on Blancanales’s face.

Blancanales wasn’t convinced. “It doesn’t look like a problem on this 10-inch barrel,” he said. “It’ll still be relatively easy to maneuver inside tight spaces. But a 10-inch tube means a sacrifice in sight radius.”

“That’s what the optics are for,” Kissinger said, pointing to the scope.

Schwartz smiled and said, “You suppose the boys over at the BATFE would approve?”

“Alcohol, tobacco, firearms and explosives? Of course not,” Lyons growled. “But luckily we don’t answer to those Bureau yo-yos.”

Blancanales stared down at the new rifle as he retraced his steps toward the entrance to the kill house.Lyons watched Kissinger tap several keys on the laptop’s keyboard and knew the armorer was changing the pop-up targets to give his fellow teammate a new challenge. A moment later he saw Blancanales appear on the screen at the starting point.

Kissinger pressed a button on the chronometer on his wrist and shouted, “Go!”

Blancanales carefully navigated his way through a mock laundry room without incident. But as soon as he stepped through the door to a hallway, a full-size target popped into view as if from out of nowhere. Blancanales swung the sound-suppressed weapon that way but didn’t fire.

A little girl stood holding a lollipop to her lips less than ten feet to Blancanales’s left. A second later, the paper target disappeared.

Blancanales moved on, his back against the wall as he navigated the corner past where the girl had stood. The screen in Kissinger’s hand changed again and Lyons could see a large bedroom just ahead of his fellow Able Team warrior. Blancanales had just stepped into the room when another target—this time a criminal-looking guy wearing a striped T-shirt, appeared. He held a large revolver in his right hand. His other arm was wrapped around the neck of a woman whose face looked terrified.

This time Blancanales tapped the trigger and three rounds of 6.8-caliber hollowpoint ammo spit from the weapon. The sound of each round was barely audible over the microphone Blancanales wore in front of his mouth. But three holes appeared in the hoodlum’s face, two inches above the frightened hostage’s head.

When Blancanales said, “Much, much better, Cowboy,” his voice seemed loud by comparison.

The words had barely left his mouth when two new targets raised their heads above the other side of the bed. The first showed only the face and neck. Blancanales passed it by. But the second target rose higher, exhibiting shoulders wearing a desert-tan camouflage BDU blouse. Blancanales turned the YHM that way but hesitated again.

A split second later the target rose slightly higher and the butt of a folding rifle stock could barely be seen. It was still impossible to ID the target as friend or foe, and the Able Team operative held his fire as another second passed.

Then the target behind the bed rose higher and began bringing the weapon up toward the Able Team warrior. Finally, he was clearly the enemy, and Blancanales put a 3-round burst into his head. The camouflaged target dropped down behind the bed.

Suddenly the first target began to rise. It wore the same style BDU desert-tan blouse. But when it rose, Lyons could see that its hands were empty.

Blancanales let it live.

The Able Team warrior moved on through the kill house, shooting the bad guys and rescuing the good. Each new room, each hall and stairway, presented new and increasingly confusing targets. But by the time Blancanales had finished clearing the third floor of the house he had a perfect score.

And while he had not set a new personal record with the unfamiliar weapon in his hands, he had come close.

Lyons was about to speak when the Farm-secured cell phone in the belt holster behind his Colt Python .357 Magnum began to vibrate. Drawing the phone much like he would the revolver, he looked at the screen. He pressed the answer button and held the device to his ear. “Yeah, Hal?” he said.

“If you’re finished playing Cowboys and Indians, I need you back at the Farm,” the Stony Man director said. “I’ve sent Jack to pick you up.”

“What have we got?” Lyons asked.

“Two backpack nukes have disappeared from a nuclear storage facility in Colorado,” Brognola said.

“Okay,” said Lyons. “We’re on our way.” He holstered the cell phone as Blancanales appeared from the kill house and walked forward, holding his new YHM and grinning ear to ear.

The man known as Ironman looked up at Kissinger. “Yankee Hill Machine has made an incredible weapon, here, Cowboy,” Lyons said. “And you’ve made it even better. We’ll take three.” Outside Ramesh, Radestan

* * *

THE MEN OF Phoenix Force and Abdul Ali kept away from the blacktop highway, using the trees and brush lining the roadway to hide them as they made their way toward Ramesh. But along with the natural concealment, they passed a seemingly endless stream of wrecked and burned-out military vehicles representing both sides of the conflict in Radestan. Old and broken-down jeeps—looking as if they’d been left over from World War II and repeatedly repaired—lined the ditch every hundred feet or so. Most still bore the spray-painted eagle-and-scimitar seal of Radestan.

But other vehicles looked more civilian in nature. Well-worn pickups and bullet-ridden sedans—many so old that the paint had worn off and the dull gray primer had become their principal color—were also lying dead in the grass and weeds. All were unmarked and David McCarter reasoned that these had belonged to private citizens before being pressed into service by one of the PSOF rebel factions.

The men of Phoenix Force had each thrown on an abat—the traditional Arab robe common throughout the Middle East—over their blacksuits, and kafiyyehs covered their heads and necks. Led by Abdul Ali, who now carried an AK-47 that rested just beneath his long black-and-gray beard, they slowly made their way through the wrecks and weeds alongside what passed for a highway.

Hawkins had been able to clean enough of the cow manure off his boots to make them wearable again and, for the most part, the snide remarks and needling from the men who had been fortunate enough not to land inside the corral had ceased.

The men from Stony Man Farm and their Radestani guide walked in silence, only speaking when some small anomaly needed to be pointed out, and then in small, hushed voices. In several of the vehicles they passed, corpses still sat behind the steering wheels and in the shotgun and rear seats. Many were upright, their heads partially blown off by enemy gunfire. Those that still had eyes stared blankly into the distance, their souls long gone from their earthly housings. Other bodies were almost headless, while still more appeared to have been burned alive, their blackened arms clawing at the handles inside the vehicles in vain attempts to escape their fiery coffins.

The corpses in the vehicles, and the semi-burned vegetation growing up around them, gave the area an eerie, otherworldly ambience.

While the ground upon which they tread was flat, across the blacktop in the distance stood a high mountain range. Around McCarter’s neck hung a pair of binoculars, which the Phoenix Force leader lifted occasionally to scan those mountains and the terrain in front of them.

The group was roughly a mile from the city when a glint of sunlight flashed from the mountains. The reflected glow lasted only a split second. But McCarter had seen such flashes of light far too many times in the past to not immediately identify its origin.

The reflection had come from the front lens of a scope. A scope mounted atop a rifle held in the hands of a shooter too inexperienced to know that he should keep the scope covered until the last few seconds before firing.

Or a rifleman who did know his business. And actually was only seconds away from squeezing the trigger. The Phoenix Force leader called for an immediate halt. “Sniper,” he said in a quiet voice because sounds, he knew, traveled far in such terrain. Raising the binoculars again, he zeroed in on the spot where he’d seen the flash. The field glasses included an automatic range finger, and they measured the distance at 642 feet. Not a long shot by any means. Even for a slip-shod Radestan regular or a semitrained rebel.

Through the lenses, McCarter could just make out the outline of a man. The sniper’s hide had been set up behind a boulder at the foot of the mountain. It was crude but sufficient to disguise the man in the distance from all but the most highly trained eye.

As he watched the still figure, the Phoenix Force leader thanked God that he was one of those highly trained eyes.

Quickly swinging the binoculars away from the sniper, McCarter moved them downrange to make it appear as though he had not spotted the enemy. With the eyepieces still pressed to his forehead, he said, “Act busy with your equipment.” Then he quickly dropped the binoculars to the end of their strap. “I don’t want him to know I’ve spotted him.” Then, to no one in particular, he added, “Can you see him?”

Calvin James had pulled the twelve-inch blade of his Crossada fighting knife from the Concealex sheath he wore on his left hip. The Crossada was a spear-pointed blend of Bowie knife and Arkansas Toothpick, and one well-placed thrust could drop a man at close range faster than a 12-gauge slug through the middle of the chest. But as McCarter watched, James began pretending to cut away some of the brush in front of him. “I can see something up there,” the former Navy SEAL said in a hushed voice. “What do you want to do?”

McCarter had swung his Rock River LAR-15 Hunter from his shoulder and pretended to be checking the magazine. The weapon sported a unique anodized finish to the aluminum hand guard, upper and lower receivers, trigger guard and charging handle. Referred to as a WYL-Ehide camo finish, from a distance it appeared to be a bronze color. But looking at it closely, the Phoenix Force leader had to smile at its furlike appearance.

The special camouflage had been digitally adopted from an actual photo of a real coyote’s hide.

Designed originally for coyote hunting, McCarter knew the RRA LAR-15 and its 5.56 mm NATO rounds worked equally well when hunting men. And it was far more accurate than the common AR-15/M-16 rifles on the market.

Especially after John “Cowboy” Kissinger finished his own tune-up.

McCarter glanced over to where James was still cutting brush. “I want you to get ready,” he said, finally answering the knife fighter’s question. “I don’t know if he’s government or rebel. But he’s definitely got us in his sights and could start pulling the trigger on us anytime.” Extending the LAR-15’s six-position stock, he kept the barrel aimed at the ground as he pressed it into his shoulder. “I’m going to take him out. But I’ve got a feeling he’s not alone.”

“Affirmative,” James said, transferring the Crossada to his left hand and continuing to swing it at the tall grass. Casually, his right hand moved to the Beretta 92-SB 9 mm on his other hip.

McCarter watched as the others silently nodded their acknowledgment of the order.

“Do you want—?” Rafael Encizo started to say.

McCarter knew there was no time for manners. “Quiet,” he said bluntly.

Encizo was a professional, too. He immediately stopped speaking.

Abdul Ali was the only man not covered by an abat. He didn’t need one to blend in. Still wearing his khaki pants, woodland cammo BDU blouse and checkered kaffiyeh, he came hurrying up from McCarter’s rear. “If he is with the resistance,” said the man with the long gray-streaked beard, “he will recognize me.”

“And if he’s not on our side and he recognizes you?” McCarter said.

Ali shrugged. “It is a chance I must take,” he said.

It was one heck of a risk, McCarter knew. Every second that passed was another second during which the sniper might fire and kill one of them. But the Phoenix Force leader knew it was a risk they had to take. He waited another full second, using the time to take in a deep breath and let half of it out again.

This could not be a common countersniper shot, the Phoenix Force leader thought as he prepared to act. They were lucky that the man in the mountain had created such a bad hide to begin with, and even luckier that he hadn’t caught the Phoenix Force leader staring back at him through the binoculars. If he had, he’d have already fired at least once, then moved. And if he saw McCarter’s LAR-15 Hunter barrel aimed his way, it would tip him off just as readily.

Taking too much time after he’d aimed the rifle would definitely cause the sniper to change positions.

Slowly, McCarter adjusted the red-dot scope on the top of the LAR’s Picatinny rail. Ali’s presence had not resulted in action by the sniper so the Phoenix Force leader waited no longer. Suddenly and without further ado, he swung his rifle barrel up and toward the mountain 642 yards away. He could see only the blurry outline of the would-be sniper’s head, shoulders and whatever rifle he held in his hands. Sighting in on the middle of the dark figure, he squeezed the trigger and felt the Hunter jump slightly in his hands.

Through the scope, McCarter saw the sniper’s head explode like a watermelon dropped from a ten-story building.

But a second later an explosion of a different type took place.

As if from out of nowhere, men bearing a variety of assault rifles, sawed-off shotguns and handguns suddenly shot up fifty feet farther down the line of brush and wrecked vehicles. And, unlike McCarter, they had no reason to hesitate.

The first dozen rounds or so seemed to come at exactly the same time, sounding like one gigantic explosion.

“Down!” McCarter yelled. It was an unnecessary order. The men of Phoenix Force and Ali had all dropped into the grass behind vehicles of their own accord.

McCarter felt his elbows sink into the damp earth just behind what had once been a Radestani army jeep. He’d had no time for an actual head count of the enemy, but a quick skim caused him to estimate roughly two dozen.

Those were the adversaries he could see. There could be more—many more, in fact—that had simply been a little slower rising and showing themselves.

In any case, Phoenix Force and their companion were outnumbered. Greatly.

But that was hardly a new situation for the men from Stony Man Farm.

John “Cowboy” Kissinger had performed his weapon-smithing magic on the Rock River LAR-15 and given it the capacity to shoot semiauto, 3-round burst or fully automatic fire. McCarter switched the selector to the latter mode as he rose briefly and held the trigger back, spraying the men farther down the roadway with a hailstorm of 5.56 mm rounds. It was not the wild firing act of panic or frustration to which less-seasoned warriors might have resorted. McCarter simply wanted to open the show with a bang. Or, more precisely, with a lot of bangs. And to make sure the enemy knew they were in for a fight.

Two of them died learning that fact as the Hunter’s barrel swept across the mass of men.

McCarter ducked into the weeds, his shoulder against the rear of a jeep as return fire flew over his head. Around him he could hear the roar of the other men’s rifles as they, too, maintained their assault on the enemy. For a brief moment his mind traveled back to the firing range at the Farm where the men of Phoenix Force had tested and evaluated dozens of rifles and add-on combinations before choosing what they liked best. All of the test weapons had been variants of the AR-15 that had been made by different companies and tailored to fit specific needs, likes and dislikes. Each had its own subtle—and sometimes not-so-subtle—differences from the others.

A short lull came to the firefight, and McCarter recalled each of his team’s favorite rifle. Manning had liked the Bushmaster. Encizo had stuck with his tried-and-true Colt. James had fallen in love with the titanium Nemo—a rifle that cost one hundred thousand dollars on the open market and was worth every penny. And Hawkins had cast his vote for a Spike’s Tactical.

But McCarter had known they would be on their own, and Murphy’s Law always applied: things would go wrong. Equipment, no matter how well made, sometimes broke down and carrying spare parts for five different weapons was out of the question. So he had chosen the LAR-15 for all of them. And none of the Phoenix Force warriors had objected very much. After all, they knew that it was a case of men fighting men—not specific weapons fighting other weapons. And the men of Phoenix Force were more than capable with any rifle placed in their hands.

So now the coyote-hide-camo rifles began throwing massive amounts of jacketed hollowpoints down the road toward the men who had sprung the sudden attack.

But were they hitting anyone? McCarter wondered. And if they were, were they killing government soldiers or People’s Secular Opposition Forces rebels?

There was only one way to find out. Keep fighting. And do your best to stay alive. And in the end, it really made little difference. While there was an attempt being made to train and unite the scattered PSOF factions, at the moment some of them were every bit as much the enemy as the Radestani regulars. Each faction had its own selfish agenda. And if any of them actually took over the government, they would immediately begin a campaign of genocide directed at the other factions.

McCarter had seen similar situations in other parts of the world. And he knew they could not allow that to happen here.

Rising again, the Phoenix Force leader aimed his new weapon over the jeep and peered above the scope. Phoenix Force’s war in Radestan was, and promised to continue being, an extremely confusing situation. But then all wars were confusing, McCarter reminded himself. And as he fired at the attackers, one man near the front finally gave away their identity by screaming out, “Allahu Akbar!” McCarter was slightly surprised but hardly shocked. The men attacking them were not government soldiers. But they weren’t one of the rebel factions, either. The men trying to kill the warriors of Phoenix Force and Abdul Ali were part of the al Qaeda terrorist faction Phoenix Force had been warned was waiting in the wings, preparing to take over the country as soon as the regulars and rebels had killed each other off.

McCarter cut loose with a 3-round burst from the Hunter, secure now that he was shooting at a faction of “bad guys” in this strange three-way war. Yes, all wars were confusing. This one just happened to be more so.

It was totally, one hundred percent, completely screwed up.

The Phoenix Force leader fired again and a trio of rounds ripped into the chest of the man who had yelled. A terrorist wearing a brown cloth safari-style hat took all three of the Phoenix Force leader’s rounds in the face, all but eliminating his head. For a second, the hat seemed to hover above the neck in midair. Then it fell straight down to land on the man’s shoulders before the body slumped out of sight and into the tall grass.

Around him, in the grass and behind the trashed vehicles, McCarter could hear the return fire from the rest of his team and Abdul Ali. Phoenix Force’s RRA LAR-15 Hunter rounds were easy enough to distinguish from the AK-47 explosions from both Ali and the al Qaeda shooters opposing them.

McCarter fired another burst, then dropped to his knee again behind the abandoned jeep. Following the time-proven strategy that you never showed yourself to the enemy more than once in the same place, he knee-walked his way to the right bumper. Leaning his face around the edge, he kept the rest of his body behind the vehicle and extended the LAR-15 at arm’s length. His body still completely covered, he risked only his hands and arms as he used his thumb on the trigger, firing a long full-auto burst blindly in the general direction of the enemy.

McCarter jerked his arms and the rifle back out of sight, immediately edging his face around the jeep’s bumper. His blind assault had done the job he’d wanted it to do, causing the enemy combatants to shrink back into hiding long enough for him to make a quick survey of the situation.

One man, however, had not been intimidated by the full-auto blast. He had dark skin and wore a bright red shirt that looked as if the sleeves had been chopped off at the shoulders with a machete. McCarter switched the selector on his LAR-15 to 3-round burst and squeezed the trigger again, this time with his eyes fixed on the center of the man’s chest.

Black holes appeared in the red cloth of his shirt as the man danced like a marionette on the end of the strings of a mad puppeteer. As he fell to the ground, another attacker—this one wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt—caught more rounds from one of the other Phoenix Force men. The AK-47 in the man’s hands flew up into the air as one of the hollowpoints apparently hit a nerve, causing his arm to rise. Red blotches appeared on the white shirt—two in the chest and one in the shoulder—as he joined his red-clad comrade in death.

Blood seeping from the bullet wounds in the red shirt had made black splotches. In the white shirt, the holes had turned red. But white or red, either way, someone needed to teach these attackers something about camouflage. Red and white did little for concealment in an environment made up of green-and-brown vegetation and rusted-out vehicles.

McCarter took a deep breath as the firing around him continued. As safe as could be expected behind the old jeep’s engine block, his eyes flashed 180 degrees through the tall grass in the vacant spaces of this automobile graveyard. As was the case in so many Third World countries, vehicles so old or used that no American would have them anymore had been shipped to Radestan. Here, locals had brought them back to life using everything from home-manufactured replacement parts to bailing wire in an effort that was, ironically, called “Yankee Ingenuity.” But even the work of such desperate mechanics had its limits, and eventually the scraps had been abandoned.

McCarter caught himself shaking his head in dismay. It seemed that everywhere he looked he saw a make and model of automobile he had not seen since he’d been a child. Other vehicles had ceased being produced before he had even been born.

As he prepared to lean around the jeep and fire again, the Phoenix Force leader saw James rise slightly behind the remnants of a 1965 Dodge Dart GT. A few spots of gold paint could still be seen on the old car’s body but ninety percent of the vehicle now sported nothing but gray primer. James’s big Crossada was back in the sheath on his hip, and the former Navy SEAL was leaning over the GT’s hood with his LAR-15. Sputtering 5.56 mm rounds through the barrel, the Hunter danced slightly in his hands as he fired a full-auto stream across the car at some target that was out of McCarter’s vision.

Dave McCarter’s attention was focused so intently on the enemies in the tall grass in front of him that he almost missed the crunching sound of footsteps to his rear. But instinct and training took over, and before he even realized what he was doing he had whirled around. Still on his knees, McCarter caught a glimmer of blue through the brown-and-yellow stalks behind him. And in less time than it would have taken to write it up in a report, he knew that no one on his team, nor Abdul Ali, had been clad in anything blue.

His finger pulled back on the trigger.

McCarter’s Rock River rifle choked out rounds and a trio of hollowpoints disappeared into the grass. He heard a low, guttural grunting sound, then the fleck of blue descended beneath the dead foliage. As the explosions from the AK-47s and Phoenix Force’s LAR-15s died down, the former British SAS man slung his rifle across his back, drew his Browning Hi-Power and crawled forward.

By the time he reached the body with the blue T-shirt, the gunfire had stopped completely. Behind him now, McCarter could hear the quiet chatter of his own men. They were moving slowly through the grass and around the abandoned vehicles, checking to make sure there were no survivors to “pop back to life” and kill them.

The man in blue who had crept toward the Phoenix Force leader from the rear had been gut-shot, then fallen facedown in the mud. McCarter had to have passed by him to the side as he’d moved forward. But the shooter had gone unseen in the underbrush. At some point, he’d regained enough strength to rise and attack from the rear.

The Phoenix Force leader knelt and checked him out closer now. An exit hole the size of a softball gaped upward from between the man’s shoulder blades. Multicolored masses of flesh, blood and bone had exited and some of it still lay on the man’s back as if dumped there. The Phoenix Force leader reached down, grabbed the shooter’s shoulder and rolled him over onto his back. He frowned slightly as he saw that two of the three rounds he had fired at the grass-hidden blue seemed to have missed.

But that didn’t matter much. One bullet had found its mark dead center in the middle of the T-shirt. It was far smaller than the one in the dead man’s back, as was to be expected for an entry wound. But between the two holes in the man’s body, the 5.56 mm hollowpoint had done its job.

The heart had to have been mangled beyond recognition.

The roar of the rifles on both sides of the skirmish was now a thing of the past. McCarter rose, turned around and walked back to join the rest of the men who had regrouped around an ancient Dodge Charger. “Everybody okay?” he asked.

Everyone nodded.

“Good,” said the Phoenix Force leader. “Then let’s get on in to Ramesh.” He paused and wiped the sweat off his brow with the back of his sleeve. “The real fighting’s about to begin.”