Rogue Force

by Don Pendleton

  Emerging from the bedroom, Blancanales found the outer door ajar, a key protruding from the lock. He didn't stop to ponder Anastasio's possession of the key; the Able warrior was beyond all caring now. What mattered was the possibility that he was blown, that Esperanza hadn't fallen victim to a would-be lover's jealous rage. If there had been a defect in his cover anywhere along the line, then Schwarz and Lyons were in jeopardy as well. Ruiz couldn't have visited them — Gadgets or the Ironman would have chewed him up and spit him out again — but others might be backing up his play, coordinating strikes against the different members of the team.

  Outside, he heard a rising babble as the neighbors worked their courage up, believing in the false security of numbers. Blancanales fed his pistol a replenished magazine and hit the doorway with determined strides, making no attempt to hide his face from the collection of uneasy men and women huddled two doors down.

  "There's been a shooting," he informed them, squeezing off a round above their heads for emphasis and watching them scatter back to their respective rooms. He questioned whether any of them would remember him with the precision necessary for a decent suspect sketch, and if they did, the police would still be groping in the dark with several thousand local residents who fit his general description.

  Blancanales concealed his pistol as he hit the stairwell, rapidly descending to the street. The aging desk clerk had his back turned and was muttering into the phone as Politician slipped past unseen. His first priority must be to put some ground between himself and Esperanza's flat. Next, he had to get in touch with Schwarz and Lyons and warn them to be ready for a possible attack. They had been coasting up to this point, covering surveillance, taking his reports, secure in the belief his cover would protect them all.

  Three blocks away he found a phone booth, ducked inside and riffled through his pockets for the necessary coins. The hotel operator hesitated when he asked for Lyons's room… or was it only his imagination? After an eternity, the phone was answered by an unfamiliar voice.

  "Hola?"

  "Room 513?"

  "That is correct. Detective Sergeant Alizondo speaking. May I have your name and number, please?"

  Blancanales cradled the receiver, then slumped against the glass wall of the phone booth. A detective sergeant in the Ironman's room meant trouble, and he couldn't begin to sort it out without endangering himself as well as any possible survivors. For now, he had no choice but to anticipate the worst.

  And somehow he must get in touch with Katzenelenbogen. Tonight. If Able Team was blown, so might be Phoenix Force. He didn't even want to take the notion to its logical conclusion, didn't want to ponder whether Bolan might be blown.

  Politician sorted through his dwindling supply of coins and fed the telephone again. Against all hope of saving anything from the disaster, he began to dial.

  21

  Finished thumbing through the magazine, Carl Lyons dropped it on the floor. He eyed the bedside telephone uneasily, relieved that there had been no call and at the same time eager for some contact with the world outside. A call would mean that there was trouble, but the Ironman felt restricted by the confines of his hotel room. The television was a write-off: ancient movies from the States, all dubbed in Spanish, or atrocious horror films from Mexico, in which the mummy, vampire or whatever had to cope with leaping acrobats and hulking wrestlers. The laughs wore off after an hour or so, replaced by tired monotony.

  It was already dark outside, and he had been expecting Gadgets back by now. The fact that Schwarz was late didn't necessarily spell trouble, but it was one more sliver of anxiety wedged underneath the Able warrior's fingernails. It had been two days since any solid contact with Politician, and now Schwarz was late from his appointed meeting with the point man out of Phoenix Force. It seemed to Lyons that the Latin mañana mentality had somehow polluted their mission, forcing everything to happen in slow motion.

  Still, Pol hadn't been exactly slow in lining up a lady for himself. She was an eyeful, too, and Lyons wondered how she was in bed, but decided he was better off not knowing. Sex could fuck up an operation — he smiled at the pun — if the several parties didn't keep their wits about them. Once emotion entered the scene, you had a world of trouble to contend with: jealousy and guilt, regret and longing, a desire to help your bedmate even when the mission was at stake. The Ironman had been there, sure… and he had learned from his mistakes.

  A decent combat soldier cherished love in abstract terms, like God and country, motherhood and apple pie. The moment love became concrete and personal, the soldier had a fatal weakness; he was vulnerable to the enemy if they should tap that wellspring of emotion, trace it to the source and use it as a weapon of the soldier's own destruction. Lyons thought of Flor Trujillo, saw the ghostly image of her smile before he slammed that mental door and threw his weight against it.

  Love's memories could get you killed, if you indulged yourself too much, and Lyons made a point of clinging to reality. Whatever pain might be involved, he could endure it. They didn't call him Ironman for nothing.

  He slid the six-inch Python out of side leather, broke the cylinder and spilled six Glaser safety slugs into his palm. Ironically nonlethal in appearance, looking more like rubber bullets than the sure-fire killers that they were, the Glasers were renowned for one-shot stopping power. Pellets of number twelve shot, suspended in liquid Teflon, were designed to blow on impact, savaging the flesh of any living target, wreaking havoc on internal organs, arteries and such. The "safety" designation indicated that a Glaser round wouldn't pierce doors or walls, endangering the innocent, but there was no such safety net for anyone who stopped a Glaser round. No one had ever managed to survive a head or torso wound from one of the explosive rounds, and even relatively minor wounds to the extremities might kill in time as liquid Teflon traveled through the bloodstream, homing on the heart and clogging the valves.

  Carl Lyons always treated Glasers with respect, aware that the smallest flesh wound might have permanent results. He alternated ammo in accordance with his task, the Python feeding anything from hollowpoints to armor-piercing loads, but in a down-and-dirty confrontation, Glasers gave the Ironman something extra up his sleeve.

  He checked the Python's action, spun the empty cylinder and decided he had time to strip and clean the piece before Schwarz got home from the meet with Phoenix. He was halfway to the closet and his cleaning kit when something made him hesitate. A sound? A feeling? What?

  There was an insistent rapping on the outer door. Lyons fed the Glasers back into the Python's cylinder and snapped it shut, his index finger circling the trigger as he stepped into the parlor of his suite. He made no further move in the direction of the door.

  "Who is it?"

  Heartbeat hesitation, then: "Room service."

  Lyons felt the short hairs lifting on his neck, the fight-or-flight response already pumping out adrenaline. "There must be some mistake," he called. "I didn't order anything."

  "Compliments of the management, señor."

  Really. After five days, he didn't believe the hotel would be sending flower baskets. Lyons sidled over to the couch, crouching behind it with his gun leveled at the door. "I'm not dressed. Leave it in the hall."

  They would be forced to move or lose it now, and he was ready when a burst of automatic fire chewed through the woodwork, shattering the double locks. A heavy boot heel slammed the door wide open, and he caught a glimpse of three or four assailants dressed as bellhops, crowding close before another string of parabellums raked the air above his head.

  One round to let them know that he was in the game, and Lyons saw the stucco sprout a fist-sized hole before he ducked for cover. Wriggling along the floor, his face pressed into heavy shag carpeting, he heard the sofa taking hits. The bastards were inside, and he would have to deal with that before they encircled him and pinned him up inside a box that would become his casket.

  Lyons reached the far end of the sofa, easing back the Python's hammer as he ri
sked a glance at his attackers. One of them was plainly visible, intent on pumping bullets through the sofa, too damned confident to imagine that his target might have moved. It was an easy shot from Lyons's prone position, and he punched a Glaser through the gunner's rib cage, blowing him away before the guy had time to realize that he had made a terminal miscalculation.

  Lyons backed it up as angry autofire converged upon his new position, shattering the sofa's arm and spewing cotton stuffing in a frenzied blizzard. He was incongruously reminded of Bing Crosby, dreaming of a white Christmas, and the mental image made him bray with sudden, unexpected laughter. Startled, his assailants hesitated as they heard their target laughing in the face of death.

  He could have used a frag grenade or two, but a lull in hostile firing was the best that Lyons could expect. Some fifteen feet of empty space lay between the Ironman and his bedroom door. The stucco walls were thin, but they provided better cover than the leaking couch, and he was running out of time.

  The Able warrior erupted from his questionable sanctuary in a combat crouch, backpedaling in the direction of the open bedroom doorway, squeezing off his four remaining Glaser rounds in rapid-fire. A lamp exploded, furniture and fixtures went to hell, but he was finally rewarded on the last round as one of his assailants toppled backward, crimson spouting from a ragged shoulder wound.

  The two survivors were unloading on him as he reached the doorway, parabellum stingers gnawing on the woodwork, plucking at his clothes. A white-hot lance drilled through the fleshy part of Lyons's side, above his belt line, and he staggered, stumbled out of range and collapsed to the floor as searching rounds explored the space that he had occupied mere heartbeats earlier.

  No time to staunch the flow of blood from what he knew to be a flesh wound. He could judge a wound's severity these days by pain; he would survive this one, provided he didn't make a habit of absorbing lead this evening.

  He broke the Python's cylinder and dumped the smoking empties, feeding in another load of Glasers, then locking down. The shooters couldn't have much time to spare; they had already suffered casualties, and they were making enough noise to raise the dead. Police would be along within the next few minutes, but the Ironman hoped that he wouldn't be forced to answer any of their questions. He wasn't prepared to finish out his mission in interrogation rooms, or at the prison ward of a hospital.

  A rush of feet on carpeting, and Lyons knew that they were coming for him. Swiveling to let his Python clear the doorjamb, Lyons sighted on one of his attackers. The shooter had an Ingram MAC-10 submachine gun, and he held the trigger down as he advanced, one-handed, free arm cocked as if he were about to pitch a baseball. Lyons didn't have to guess what he was carrying; he ducked a string of parabellum rounds and slammed two Glasers home into the gunner's stomach. Gutted, dying, his assailant still had enough strength to make the pitch, and Lyons was already moving out when the grenade rebounded off a nightstand, wobbling across the carpet toward his hiding place.

  The closet was his only hope, and Lyons hit the sliding doors full tilt, the inner rack and hanging outfits coming down on top of him. Knees pressed against his chest, eyes closed, he rode the thunderclap that rocked his bedroom, lying deathly still as shrapnel ripped the walls above his head.

  His ears were ringing and his wound was burning, bleeding steadily as Lyons scrambled out from under cover, searching for a target with his Python. Three down, one to go.

  * * *

  Schwarz knew that it was late, but it couldn't be helped. The men of Phoenix Force were spread so thin in their surveillance that his contact, Gary Manning, had been late for the meet, apologizing with the explanation that he had been following Luis Machado on his rounds and compelled to wait for Katzenelenbogen to relieve him. It was the Israeli's news that interested Schwarz the most; perhaps disturbed was a more accurate description of his feelings, after listening to Manning for the best part of an hour.

  There was still no evidence connecting any of Machado's Contras with McNerney's operation, but Machado's second-in-command, one Anastasio Ruiz, had met that afternoon with an apparent senior agent of the local CIA. There hadn't been an opportunity to tap their conversation, but Ruiz was under scrutiny, and Katz was juggling their numbers, trying desperately to cover his connection with the Company.

  It came as no surprise for Contras to be doing business with the CIA. The Agency had backed their play from the beginning, openly at first, and then through different proxies as the mood in Congress had gradually begun to change, inclining more toward a selective isolationism. It was only natural for the Machado troops to have their tie-ins with the Company, and yet…

  The timing worried Schwarz. They had a man inside, already living on the razor's edge, and any alteration of routine at this point was a cause for deep concern. He knew about Ruiz from Pol: the Contra's obvious infatuation with the woman, Esperanza; his apparent jealousy of Blancanales. What that meant in concrete terms, or how it might connect with CIA, was anybody's guess. There was a chance Ruiz might try to intervene in Pol's relationship with Esperanza, or he might back off and let it lie. Whichever, Schwarz was agitated by the sudden contact with a troubleshooter for the Agency.

  It would be helpful to identify the man from Langley, and Gadgets understood that Katz was working on that now. A firm ID could always be relayed to Wonderland, where Hal might have an opportunity to match the name against his list of coconspirators. If Anastasio's connection was a part of the McNerney game, they had their link. If not… then they were right back at the drawing board.

  Schwarz checked his watch and cursed beneath his breath. He would catch hell from Lyons, nervous as the Ironman seemed to be these days. He knew that Carl was worried for Politician's sake and by the blurry nature of their mission, overall. They were on standby, serving as reserves for Bolan if he needed them, but they had no real grasp of Bolan's situation, even his location from one moment to the next. For all they knew, he might have slipped across the line and into Nicaragua; by the time they missed him, it would be too late.

  And if they lost him? Then what? Gadgets knew the answer even before the question finished coalescing in his mind. If they lost Bolan or any of the others, they would forge ahead. As long as one of them was still alive, the mission was a go. They were committed, and surrender wasn't part of the vocabulary taught at Stony Man.

  The hotel loomed ahead of him, and Schwarz ducked through the swinging doors, relieved to find the lobby almost empty. In a corner chair a meaty tourist type was browsing through the local paper, and a well-dressed couple kept the desk clerk busy, signing in and waiting for a bellhop to assist them with their luggage. Gadgets flipped a mental coin, deciding on the elevator. Riding up alone and humming to himself, he tried to find the perfect phrasing to begin his apology to Lyons.

  Every thought of conversation vanished as the elevator doors hissed open on a roaring battlefield. From somewhere to his left, the sound of automatic weapons rattled in the corridor, eclipsed and punctuated by the booming answer of a Magnum handgun. Digging for the Beretta 93-R beneath his jacket, Schwarz knew instantly that there could only be a single explanation for the racket. Someone had seen through their cover, and the opposition meant to close their show with a bang.

  As if in answer to his thoughts, a muffled blast sent shock waves rippling through the floor beneath his feet. Downrange, the ceiling released a misty rain of plaster. Schwarz was closing on the room he shared with Lyons, saw the door was standing open, gnawed by point-blank rounds, when a disheveled figure stumbled through the smoky portal. He was dressed like a bellhop, but the automatic weapon that he carried wasn't standard gear for any hotel concierge.

  The hitter sprayed another burst into the suite, retreating toward his death as Schwarz lined up and slammed a double punch between his shoulder blades. The gunner dropped, triggering a last reflexive burst that carved an abstract pattern on the wall. Schwarz put another round behind one ear to pin him there for good and swiveled, tracking, as a
nother tattered figure cleared the doorway.

  Carl Lyons looked like death warmed over, blond hair tousled, his sport shirt saturated on one side with seeping blood. The Python's muzzle locked on Gadgets for a moment, then slipped to Lyons's side.

  "Looks like I missed the party," Schwarz quipped.

  "Better late than never."

  "Yeah. I take it that we're checking out?"

  "I'd say. We'll touch base with Pol when we get clear."

  "You need a medic."

  "Never mind," the Ironman growled. "It's in and out. A compress ought to do it."

  Schwarz wasn't convinced, but he wasn't about to start an argument with doors already easing open and frightened faces peering up and down the corridor.

  "You packed?"

  "You're looking at it," Lyons told him, shrugging on a jacket that he carried in his free hand. They were leaving everything behind, but none of it was irreplaceable. Mobility was crucial to an operative in the field.

  "Who blew us?" Gadgets asked when they were safely in the elevator.

  "I was hoping you'd tell me."

  He thought about it while they passed two floors. "Machado's right hand had a sit-down with a spokesman from the Agency. There might be some connection."

  "That's Ruiz?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "He wants Pol's ass. How does that lead him back to us?"

  "I haven't got a damned idea. I'm fishing."

  "Shit. We've gotta find Pol before somebody makes a move on him."

  "I hear you."

  Still no action in the lobby, indicating that their fifth-floor neighbors hadn't yet found the courage to call for help. The well-dressed couple had already disappeared upstairs, and the desk clerk was busy with his register. On Schwarz's left, the tourist-type was still concealed behind his paper. Reading? Dozing?