War Tactic

by Don Pendleton

  From his pocket he took the money clip he had been issued. It was full of a thick roll of local currency. Phoenix Force was always issued cash before foreign and “plausibly deniable” missions, given they never knew when they might need to buy some cooperation, pay off some corrupt official or otherwise meet field expenses. McCarter did some quick math, peeled off a wad of bills and dropped it into the jar. It was probably more money than this family would see in a good long while. Hopefully it would make up for Phoenix Force’s presence here.

  “I’ve got movement across the street and up four houses,” James stated. “Confirmed, contact. Enemy shooters. Black BDUs, assault rifles. AR-pattern. These have to be our boys.” He paused. “All right, they’re kicking in doors, sweeping from house to house. It’s just a matter of time before they get to us.”

  “Get ready,” McCarter said, peering out his own window. “Can you give me a count? I can’t see from this angle.”

  “There are an awful damned lot of them,” James said. “I count at least twenty, and there are more beyond that. I’m seeing more vehicles. Four-wheel-drives, local make. Those little runabouts that everybody likes so much in these parts.”

  “I can feel the odds against us climbing, mate,” McCarter said. “Everybody hold fast. We need to take them by surprise if we’re going to have a chance to break through. Don’t engage until they’re on top of us.”

  There was a chorus of assent. McCarter flexed his fingers on the grip of his Tavor. They still had plenty of ammunition for their weapons, but that was going to change fast if the firefight became protracted.

  “They’re two houses down,” James warned.

  “Steady, lads,” McCarter said. “Everyone get your smoke grenades ready. Find a window. Get ready to smash it out if you have to.”

  “Here they come,” James said. “Wait. They’ve rousted someone from the neighboring house. Repeat, we’ve got civilians on the field. Civilians on the field.”

  The civilians moved past McCarter’s point of view. “They’re on their way out of the combat zone,” the Briton said. There were two elderly Filipinos, a man and a woman. McCarter did not intend to let them get hurt. “Let them get clear.”

  There was a pounding at the door. Someone outside said, in English, “Open up! We’re coming in if you don’t open up!”

  “David?” James asked through his transceiver.

  “Wait for it,” McCarter said. The pounding at the door grew more intense. From where he crouched, McCarter actually heard the sound of a pump-action shotgun being racked.

  “They’re going to breach!” James whispered.

  “Steady,” McCarter cautioned.

  The old couple disappeared into a cross-alley on the opposite side of the street. There was a thundering report as the gunmen outside blew the lock on the front door.

  “Now!” McCarter ordered. He opened fire through his window at the few armed men he could see.

  Calvin James brought his Tavor up and fired several rapid bursts directly through the front door. There was a brief scream, cut short, as the man on the other end of the breaching gun discovered that some doorways fired back. Then James was diving out of the way as return fire from the gunmen began to stitch the bare floor and the wall beyond. James rolled to the side of the entrance, using the wall for cover, knowing that this was not worth much. Bullets were passing through the exterior walls of the house with ease.

  “Calvin, get clear,” McCarter urged. James did so, scooting across the floor like a crab, staying out of the worst of it as bullets blew plaster dust through the air above his head. There was little left of the front door, which had been blown to splinters by the concentrated fire of armed men reacting to the loss of one of their own.

  “Smoke now!” McCarter ordered. He pulled the pin on the smoke canister he had palmed, let the gren arm itself and dumped it out the window. James was not positioned by a window, so he could not do the same, but Manning, Encizo and Hawkins acknowledged the order via their transceivers. Thick, dense, artificially black smoke began to fill the street outside.

  The gunmen responded by firing blindly into the smoke cloud. McCarter motioned to James then smashed out what little glass was left in his window. He climbed out with James covering him and then took up a crouch near the corner of the house. Through the smoke, he could see the black-clad shooters running, confused, trying to acquire their targets.

  “Gary,” McCarter said quietly. “Work your way around the back, to the side of the house. Take up position with your launcher. Wait for the pretty lights.”

  “Copy,” Manning said.

  In combat, motion was life. But motion without a purpose, movement just to move, was seldom helpful. And in this case, it was going to get the enemy shooters killed.

  In the smoke, McCarter’s red-dot sight was not useful. He fired from the hip, aiming with his barrel, shooting in brief, controlled bursts for maximum effect. There was more screaming, and more men fell. The muzzle-flashes that followed were visible through the smoke. As was predictable, the gunmen had grouped together in the pall, making one clustered target, believing that if they moved in so they could see each other, they would not be disoriented by the cloud.

  “Gary,” McCarter said. “Hit them.”

  The chunk of Manning’s launcher was the kind of sound a man either ignored or learned to fear. He ignored it if he had never heard it before; it was not all that impressive, a vaguely pneumatic thump from which the Vietnam-era M-79 “Thumper” and handheld launcher took its name. “Blooper” was another name applied to that particular weapon. Nothing about the sound, the first time a man heard it, was menacing. It was merely curious.

  A man who had been on the receiving end of a Thumper learned to fear that sound to his very core, however. In the smoke, McCarter could hear the rhythmic thump-thump-thump as Manning loaded, fired, ejected the shell and loaded to fire again. The gunmen in the smoke were too close to each other. They never stood a chance.

  By the time the smoke cleared, there were only a few stragglers who were now fleeing down the street. McCarter and James took aim with their Tavors and shot them down with well-placed and patiently timed head-shots. The bodies hit the street just as a new sound reached McCarter’s ears. It was the sound of multiple engines approaching.

  “Contact west!” Manning shouted.

  The trucks that broke through the smoke were olive-drab in color and bore the insignia of the Filipino military. McCarter held his Tavor over his head. “Hold fire! Hold fire!” he announced. “These are Ocampo’s people.”

  There were a few tense minutes as armed infantry piled out of the troop trucks. The hard looks on the soldiers’ faces were replaced with relief when Ocampo managed to limp outside with Hawkins helping him. The lieutenant explained the situation to his men. He then, with the assistance of one of his own men, walked slowly to McCarter.

  “My government is very angry,” Ocampo began.

  “How do you know?” McCarter asked. “Not that I doubt it.”

  Ocampo held up a wireless phone. “I called them. That is how my troops knew to come here. I thought we would be saving your lives.” He looked at the crater in the street and the dead bodies scattered around it. “I can see that I was wrong. But our intelligence agents report that there are more armed men in the city. We do not know who they are. We are hunting them, but we have not found them. They may find you first, and I have been forbidden to offer you further support. Your government and I will have to have a…heart-on-heart chat, yes?”

  “Heart-to-heart,” McCarter said. “But, yeah, I can see how they might need to do that.”

  “Just so,” Ocampo agreed. “American?”

  “I told you, mate. I’m British.”

  “A Western power is a Western power,” said Ocampo, smiling. “But I thank you for saving my life.”

  “You’re welcome,” McCarter said. He turned to go but, before he did, he ducked back inside the bullet-riddled house. Once more he withdr
ew his money clip, shrugged and dumped the remainder of his cash into the jar in the living room, which had somehow escaped all the gunfire without taking a bullet. Then he left. He did not look back. As he hit the street again, Ocampo and his troops were pulling out.

  “They’re still hunting us,” Encizo said. “And now we’ve got no local support.”

  “Fair enough,” said McCarter. He hefted his Tavor, checking the magazine. “Let’s go, lads. Our work here isn’t done. Not by a good bit yet.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Lyons stalked through the factory floor. There was a lot of machinery here, most of it devoted to manufacturing casings of some kind or another. He saw plenty of stuff that looked like rocket warheads without any guts in them, and he saw electronics. What he didn’t see was explosives. From what little he knew about the process to make warheads of this type, the explosives to arm them wouldn’t be added until a final stage at a different facility. That enabled a factory such as this to sit in a relatively “normal” industrial neighborhood, without the additional security and controls that would be needed for explosives and other munitions. It also meant he didn’t have to worry about accidentally blowing the place up with his team inside it.

  Movement at the corner of his eye caught his attention. He ducked behind the nearest piece of machinery, some kind of pipe-fitting gadget used to bend lengths of cylindrical metal.

  Lyons was in no mood for pretending, playing political games or dragging this out any longer than was absolutely necessary. From his vantage behind the pipe-fitting machine, Lyons pulled a frag grenade from his war bag and popped the pin. Holding down the spoon, he called out, “Hey, you! Yeah, I’m talking to you. Justice Department. You’re under arrest.”

  Bullets immediately swarmed his position, blowing pieces from the machine and showering him with fragments of metal. The ricochets flew in every direction, knocking out overhead lights, digging furrows in the floor and generally wreaking havoc. Lyons waited for the shooter or shooters on the other end to burn through an entire magazine, which was what they seemed inclined to do. When the anticipated lull in the shooting came, he called out, “You have until the count of ten to surrender, or I’m going to kill you!”

  “Up yours!” one of the gunmen shouted.

  That seemed pretty unambiguous to Lyons. He was going to stick to his original impulse on this mission. That meant cutting to the end whenever he could, slicing through the red tape that always seemed to characterize these operations.

  “Okay, ten!” Lyons called out, and threw his grenade.

  Ducking back again, he counted in his head. He heard the grenade land on the concrete floor, heard it skitter across the hard surface and heard it come to a stop.

  Then he took three more grenades from his bag. As the first explosion ripped through the manufacturing floor, he was pulling pins and readying more bombs. He kept tossing them, staggering them for effect. The explosions that rolled through the room ripped apart workstations and hand tools…and the men hiding behind them. Lyons risked a look from behind his cover and counted three—no, four bodies hitting the floor in pieces.

  Time to go to work.

  Lyons was up with the USAS-12 in his fists, a fully loaded drum of mixed 00 Buck and rifled slugs ready to go. In a combat crouch, he glided through the manufacturing area, sidestepping the circle of destruction his grenades had made. The smoke was clearing. An alarm began to ring somewhere in the building. He looked up, wondering if sprinkler heads were going to drench him, but there was no such system in place.

  Just as well. He hated working in the rain.

  There was more movement at the far end of the manufacturing space.

  “Hey!” Lyons shouted. “Justice Department!”

  One of the figures raised an AR-15 rifle and squeezed off a shot. Lyons dodged to the right and triggered a triple blast from his USAS-12.

  A slug preceded and followed by cones of buckshot, each of the pellets as big around as a 9 mm bullet, ripped into the gunman and dropped him, disemboweled, to the floor. The dead man’s buddies ducked behind the obstacles nearest them. The machines and workstations formed a maze of hard cover that could easily stop bullets, which was why Lyons had resorted to grenades in the first place.

  “Not so fast,” the Able Team leader said. He lifted the barrel of his shotgun and held back the trigger once more, moving the weapon left and right, spraying slugs and shot like a fireman with a hose. The ceiling tiles and the metal light fixtures hanging from them wrenched from their moorings, split and cracked and scattered. This debris, much of it sharp-edged, began falling on the hiding gunmen. At least one man was impaled through the neck by a spar from the overhead lights, which had ripped apart at a sharp angle and formed a spear driven by gravity.

  “Lights out,” Lyons declared, realizing as he said it that he sounded like a certain famous action-movie star. He looked around, hoping there was no one to overhear him ham it up like that. For crying out loud. He had been hanging around Schwarz for too long.

  The big former cop finished his circuit through the manufacturing floor. He put a finger to the transceiver in his ear. “Gadgets, Pol, what’s the story up there?”

  “We’re encountering heavy resistance in the north stairwell,” Schwarz explained. “Can you work your away around to the south?”

  “Will do,” Lyons said. “Let me know if you punch through on that side. If we can, we’ll meet in the middle.”

  “Roger,” Schwarz said.

  Lyons hit the fire door at a good clip, only to rebound from it with a deafening boom. He rubbed his shoulder and stared at the door for a split second. Well, hell. So much for taking anybody on the other side by surprise.

  From his war bag he produced one of the little plastic-explosive door poppers Kissinger had cooked up—a button of C-4 with an adhesive backing and a pre-timed detonator that bore only a single switch. Lyons peeled the adhesive backing, slapped the bomb on the fire door near the crash bar and flicked the switch. Then he backed away several paces and flattened himself against the wall.

  The door blew, shooting the crash bar three feet to the floor and leaving a smoking crater in the door’s metal surface. Lyons let his USAS-12 fall to the length of its sling, which he had draped over his shoulder, and pulled his Python from its shoulder holster.

  “Three,” Lyons said. “Two. One.”

  The door flew open and a man in a Blackstar uniform practically fell out of it. He was carrying a mini-Uzi submachine gun and, when he recovered his bearings, looking shaken from the explosion, he turned to bracket Lyons. The poor bastard never had a chance. He was moving so slowly that a good street caricature artist would have had time to draw a picture of him. Lyons almost casually extended his Python and pulled the trigger, double-action punching a .357 round through the man’s throat. The guard dropped his weapon and clutched at his throat before collapsing to the now bloody floor.

  Lyons counted again, this time silently. He was right to do so. He had guessed that the first man, probably standing just inside the door and lying in wait for anyone who tried to enter the stairwell, had been a little shell-shocked by the explosion. But it also stood to reason that there would be a second man. These Blackstar thugs always seemed to roam in pairs or groups. The second guy, seeing his partner rush in like the fool that he was, had waited, hoping that whatever hostile force was on the other side of that door might reveal itself—or even get shot—before he had to put his own bacon on the line. Now the Blackstar man was peeking out the half-open door, maybe thinking the dead guy and the dead guy’s killer had managed to off each other in the brief firefight.

  “Hey, dipwad,” Lyons called. “Over here.”

  The look on the Blackstar thug’s face was priceless. He turned, locked eyes with Lyons and then actually squeezed his eyes shut, as if not being able to see it coming might mean it wasn’t. Lyons didn’t waste any time telling him to put down his weapon. The mercenary was already reaching for the pistol holstered at his
side. The Able Team leader simply shot him in the chest, center-mass, and watched him fall.

  “Not…not…” the man struggled to say.

  Lyons walked over to stand above him. “How many more of your people in the stairwell?” he asked.

  “Get me…get me a doctor…”

  Lyons closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. When he opened them again, he said, “You guys, you make me laugh. You shoot at anybody who looks at you funny. You don’t care how many people get hurt. You’ll kill a cop, you’ll kill a Fed… It’s all the same to you. But when you screw up and get tagged, it’s all, ‘Get me a doctor.’ You’ll get a medical examiner, pal. That’s a coroner, if you’re not up on the current lingo. That’s what you get.”

  “Only…following…orders…” the man struggled to say. His eyes started to roll back into his head.

  “Isn’t it funny,” Lyons said, lining up a mercy shot over the man’s forehead, “just how many murderers hide behind a line like that.”

  He pulled the trigger.

  Bounding up the stairwell, taking the steps two at a time, he made his way into the office area.

  What greeted him was the usual cube farm. Gray, fabric-colored half walls separated the desks from each other. There was no one around that he could see, but from here, the shooting from the stairwell at the opposite end of the building was loud enough to put his combat senses on high alert. The Blackstar men were guarding the stairwells and doing everything they could to prevent enemies from coming up. But they’d gotten distracted. Schwarz and Blancanales were apparently giving them a hard enough time that they’d forgotten to cover Lyons’s end of the building.