Oceans of Fire

by Don Pendleton

  “Affirmative, Able Flight! Get the hell out of here!”

  “Ironman! What about you—”

  “I’m going to commandeer one of their helicopters!” Lyons roared. “Get out of here!”

  “Affirmative, Ironman! Able Flight—”

  The ceiling above the executive suite shuddered and concrete, ceiling lights and rebar blasted downward from a five-foot hole in the roof of IESHEN Group corporate headquarters. The breaching charge filled the executive suite with smoke and gray dust. Lyons roared above the ringing in his ears. “Grenade!”

  He overturned a table and Tenari ripped up a computer desk and tipped it over as a pair of black, soda-pop-can-size cylinders dropped down through the hole. Lyons squeezed his eyes shut and covered his ears. The flash-stun grenades detonated like thunderclaps and blasts of white light highlighted the veins behind his eyelids. He blinked and rose with his SOCOM pistol in a two-handed hold. The overpressure of the stun grenades whipped the dust and smoke into curling maelstroms. Most of the overhead lighting was gone and in the gloom the stun grenades’ after-blast pyrotechnic effect left thousands of sparks whirling and blinking like berserk fireflies. The fire suppression unit came on and sprinklers descended to spray the landscape. The broken mains over the hole in the roof spilled their water like garden hoses.

  A man in full riot armor repelled through the hole. As his boots hit the carpet, he brought up is G-36 short assault rifle. Lyons’s silenced .45 cycled in his hand as he shot the man in his face shield. His helmet and armor were rated against bullets. His visor was made to stop bricks and bottles. The Plexiglas punched inward and went opaque with blood as the man fell bonelessly to the floor.

  A second man dropped down through the hole as two of Tenari’s bullets cored both legs before he even hit the floor.

  Lyons snarled across the link. “T! Get his rifle and grenades! Akira, covering fire!”

  The two men leaped over their cover. Tokaido rose with the folding stock of his Skorpion machine pistol firmly against his shoulder. A third man repelled down and the Skorpion snarled on full-auto. The attacker twisted and lost purchase on the rope as he took the burst. The young hacker raised his aim and sprayed the rest of the magazine up the smoking hole.

  Lyons grabbed the body of the first man down and heaved him back behind cover. Tenari picked up his man and hurled him over the top of the overturned computer desk. Tokaido sprayed a second magazine up the hole. He ducked as bullets sprayed back and ripped wood chips from the table.

  Lyons stripped the dead man of his G-36 and pulled a flash-stun from his web belt. “T! They’re going to hit us again! Duck and cover, after the grenades go off, hit ’em back with the same!”

  “Affirmative, Ironman! I—Grenades!”

  The grenades detonated with a whipcrack rather than thunder, and shrapnel sprayed the executive suite. A second rope snaked down the hole and armored men slid down both. Lyons and Tenari flung their flash-stuns and covered their ears. Twin thunderclaps rocked the room and twin lightning flashes lit up everything in incandescent white. The Able Team leader rose with his assault rifle spraying on full-auto. Tenari’s joined his a second later and the assault team was put in a killing cross fire.

  “T, we gotta get upstairs. Grab every grenade and all the ammo on that body!” Lyons pulled the grenades from his man’s web gear. There were two flash-stuns and two frags. Lyons shoved spare mags into his pockets and looped his rifle sling around his neck. Tenari rose with both mitts full of grenades. Lyons looped a frag through the hole in the roof and hurled a flash-stun after it. His partner tossed up two more from the opposite side and up on the roof thunder boomed and fragmentation cracked in counterpoint.

  Through the din, screams pealed forth on the roof. Lyons threw his last flash-stun and retained his last frag. “T! I need a boost!”

  The blacksuit dragged the fallen desk over and jumped on top. He pulled the pins on his last two grenades and tossed them up through the hole. “One! Two! Three!” The hole above lit up with white and yellow flashes. “Go!”

  The desk creaked as it took their weight. Lyons crawled up the massive Samoan like a ladder. Lyons put a hand on the man’s head and pushed himself up. He stood on the big man’s shoulders and found the top third of his body out in the Berlin night.

  Fallen men lay in a circle around the blackened hole. Some moaned and writhed, clutching shrapnel wounds. Others lay unmoving. A civilian Augusta/Bell AB.109 helicopter sat on the pad with its rotors turning. The chopper was first priority. Lyons shouldered his rifle and put his front sight on the pilot side of the cockpit. The G-36 rifle rattled off twenty rounds. The windscreen pocked and turned opaque with bullet hits. The whine of the engines died as the dead pilot released the throttle. Lyons heaved himself up onto the roof. “T! Get Akira up here!”

  Tenari yanked the younger man up onto the desk and heaved him upward. “Carl, Akira says he heard something!”

  Lyons reached down and grabbed Akira’s hand. “They’re on this floor!” Tokaido shouted. “I think they’re in the stairwell—”

  “Jesus!” Lyons groaned as he suddenly took all ofAkira’s weight one-handed. Black-armored forms were dog-piling onto Tenari below. Tokaido flailed in midair. “Carl!”

  He slid through Lyons’s wet hand. “Carl!”

  Lyons threw himself backward as a pair of rifles firing on full automatic sent tracers streaking up through the hole. “Akira! Akira!”

  The copilot had leaped from the helicopter. His handgun chipped roofing inches from Lyons’s feet. The Able Team leader rolled behind a ventilating unit and clawed for a fresh mag. “Akira!”

  THE YOUNG COMPUTER WHIZ fell through space. Almost instantly the air blasted out of his lungs as he hit the desktop. Water from the broken sprinkler main poured into his face. He groaned and flopped to the floor. “That’s their IT guy!” A voice boomed. “Herr Deyn wants him alive!”

  Tokaido blinked and gasped as a man in a black raid suit leaped on top of him and knee-rammed his chest. A hand grabbed for his gun. He twisted his wrist and by accident the muzzle of the Skorpion machine pistol flicked up under his assailant’s face shield. Tokaido desperately squeezed the trigger. The Skorpion sprayed and the interior of the visor went red as all twenty rounds ricocheted inside the bulletproof helmet, churning the interior into chum.

  Tokaido pushed the man off and struggled to his hands and knees. His machine pistol was empty, he was out of mags and he couldn’t seem to get any air into his lungs. He looked up dazedly and saw Tino Tenari under siege.

  The big man’s rifle was gone. He pressed an armored opponent up over his head and bodily hurled him into a desk. Another man lay at his feet with his head flopped at a horrible angle. Two more armored men slammed into Tenari from both sides and wrestled his arms to his sides. A big man stalked forward. His face was dark beneath his visor, and the young hacker recognized him from Phoenix Force’s after-action file as Clay Forbes. The ex-Navy SEAL held a huge revolver in his hand. He pressed the muzzle into Tenari’s chest as he struggled between the two security men, and pulled the trigger. The Magnum revolver’s roar was deafening. Tokaido started with shock as the bullet burst out of the blacksuit’s back. He went limp between the two men and fell to the floor.

  Tokaido’s Walther PPK filled his hand without thought. The laser sight printed a ruby dot on Forbes’s chest. His voice rose to a scream of hatred “Tino!”

  Forbes took an involuntary step back as the young man printed a fist-size pattern of seven holes over his heart. Forbes’s teeth flashed beneath his visor in a snarl of outrage. “You little prick!” Tokaido remembered too late that his opponent was armored, and desperately reached for his spare magazine. Forbes stalked forward and kicked the pistol out of his hand. Tokaido started to go for his concealed Beretta when the bottom of Forbes’s boot came down and the world ended. Two more armored men stepped in and boots began falling on the young computer genius like rain. His vision went white with agony as one of the
men connected with his kidney. The stomping seemed to go on forever.

  “That’s enough! We want him alive! Harte! Jup! Get his narrow ass out of here.” Forbes looked up at the sound of gunfire upstairs. “Alexsandr! This is Forbes! We have one hostile still active on the roof and—”

  Jup fell, clutching his hands under his face shield, thrashing and screaming. Harte had straightened. The blood drained from his face and spurted between the fingers he held against his throat. Forbes was appalled.

  The IT geek had a third gun.

  The tiny .25 rose toward Forbes’s face. Through the mask of blood and swelling, stone-cold rage burned in the young man’s eyes. Forbes brought his .357 down in an ugly arc and chopped it into the young man’s wrist. The kid yelped in pain, and the hideaway gun went flying. Forbes’s backhand blow left him sprawled in the rain from the sprinkler system. The former Navy SEAL seized the front of his opponent’s shirt and yanked him up, cocking back his hand for another blow. “You ever been pistol-whipped, punk? Well, you’re gonna be, but good.”

  Tokaido’s eyes flicked from the stainless-steel bludgeon to somewhere over Forbes’s shoulder.

  Forbes whirled.

  Tino Tenari’s right hand flew forward. His fist plowed through Forbes’s Plexiglas face shield like a train wreck. Forbes staggered backward, spitting teeth.

  The Samoan ex-Air Policeman shambled unsteadily after his opponent. The entire front of his white coverall was wet with blood. His face was as pale as death. His voice came out in a beleaguered groan. “Get out of here, kid.”

  Tenari’s left hand hit Forbes in the chest like a battering ram. The force of it slammed the ex-SEAL back against the far wall. Despite his body armor Forbes bounced and fell gasping to one knee. The blacksuit came in. Forbes spit blood and raised his revolver. Tenari lumbered straight at the gun with his right hand cocked back for the kill. Flame eclipsed the muzzle of Forbes’s snub-nosed .357 Magnum revolver as it roared four times in rapid succession. Tino Tenari fell to the floor at Forbes’s feet. The .357 Magnum hollowpoint rounds had left five fist-size exit wounds in the big man’s back.

  “Now…” Forbes gasped. “You.” He rose and stalked back to his prey. The beaten and bloody young man was trying to crawl away. He grabbed him by his hair and yanked him to his knees. “You are coming with me and—Mother!”

  Razor-sharp steel cut through Forbes’s black tactical raid suit and burned across his forearm. He chopped the trigger guard of his pistol into the side of Tokaido’s neck. He clouted him once in the temple for good measure and the young man went limp.

  Voices shouted from the stairwell. “Herr Forbes!”

  Forbes wiped his revolver on his pant leg and reloaded. “Clear!”

  A six-man strike team pounded in with their rifles leveled. Their eyes went wide beneath their visors at the carnage littering the floor. Forbes wiped blood from his mouth and spoke into his mike. “Alexsandr, we still have one on the roof, and one on the loose somewhere around main security.”

  “We have the stairs covered, the elevators are inoperable.”

  Forbes’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Alexsandr, he’s got thirty floors to climb. This son of a bitch knows he’s cut off. I think he’s coming down. I think he’s coming straight down at you.”

  “We will be ready.”

  Another six men charged into the room.

  Forbes glanced at his squad. “You two, put the hole in a cross fire. Kill anything that comes down. You two, take the prisoner down to the assembly point in the garage. The rest of you are with me, we’re going topside.”

  “AKIRA!” LYONS BELLOWED into his com link. “T!”

  No response. Lyons ignored the man across the roof with the pistol and charged back to the hole. A bullet whined past his ear as he ran, and gunfire erupted below as he snatched a look down. He emptied his magazine and jumped back. He had seen enough. Tino Tenari lay on his face. His back was cratered with exit wounds. There was at least a squad of armed men below. Akira was nowhere in sight. TNT was KIA. Brognola was a POW and Akira was MIA.

  The mission was FUBAR.

  Lyons tasted bitter rage. He had failed the Bear. He’d promised to keep Akira safe. Tino had died trying to keep that promise. The copilot took another shot at Lyons as he crouched. Rage turned the world into a red haze around him. Carl Lyons shoved his last magazine into his stolen rifle and stood. He was just going to jump down that hole and kill every son of a bitch in the building.

  The Ironman’s berserker mode broke as a pair of grenades looped up out of the hole and clanked down on the rooftop. He hurled himself back behind the ventilator as the grenades flashed yellow, and razor-sharp bits of shrapnel hissed and rattled against the ventilator housing.

  Down the hole someone was shouting with the unmistakable authority of command. “Schnell! Schnell! Schnell!”

  The enemy was coming up in squad strength. Another two grenades clattered to the roof to keep him pinned. Riflemen below were ready to rip him apart from all sides if he jumped down. There were two stairwells on either side of the roof. In seconds they would have him in a cross fire. There was only one course of action left.

  Lyons charged.

  The copilot shouted in alarm and fired as the Ironman bore down on him. Lyons heard the supersonic crack of the bullets ripping past him. He held his rifle in the hip-assault position and sprayed on full-auto. The copilot ducked back behind his helicopter. Sparks and bits of glass caromed off the cockpit as Lyons closed the distance. The copilot looked up from reloading his handgun in horror as the Able Team leader rounded the helicopter. The smoking, empty G-36 short assault rifle spun in his hand like a drum major’s baton. He raised the rifle overhead by the forestock and swung it down like the Grim Reaper’s scythe. The six and a half pound assault weapon crunched into the copilot’s skull with grim finality.

  Lyons grabbed the dead man’s gun, racked the slide on a fresh round and leaped into the copilot’s seat. He had no choice but to try to fly the chopper, hoping he remembered what Grimaldi had taught him. Doors flew open on either side of the roof and light beamed from the stairwells. Armed men spilled forth. Lyons rammed his throttles forward. The turbines whined and the rotors beat the air. The assault teams dropped to one knee and raised their rifles. All hell broke loose as eight automatic weapons opened up and began to chew the helicopter apart.

  The besieged aircraft began to rise jerkily into the air. Bullets hit the fuselage like hail. Lyons ignored the carnage as he kicked his collective and concentrated on keeping the helicopter aloft. The chopper slew sideways two feet off the roof. The assault team to the left emptied their rifles and scattered as the aircraft scudded across the roof straight at them. Alarms rang and red lights flashed in the cockpit. A rifleman screamed and flapped like a ruptured bird against the glass as the chin of the chopper slammed into him and scooped him off the roof. IESHEN Group headquarters disappeared beneath Lyons’s skids.

  The men on the other side of the roof chased the chopper and continued to fire their weapons. Lyons snarled and wrestled the stick as he suddenly began to lose power. He was falling like a stone. If IESHEN Group corporate headquarters didn’t scrape the sky at seventy stories, he would already have hit the neighboring buildings. Bullets hit the chopper from above in bee swarms.

  Lyons hit his throat mike for the Stony Man Farm uplink at the Berlin CIA substation as he lost hydraulic pressure. “Mayday! Mayday! This is Ironman! I am in enemy chopper and going down!” Something above Lyons’s head began clanking with each turn of the rotors and the smell of burning oil filled the cockpit. “Hal, POW! Akira, presumed POW! Tenari, KIA! Gadgets’s status, unknown!” The stick went dead in Lyons’s hand and the helicopter began to autorotate and spin out of the sky. “I repeat! Mayday! Mayday! This is Ironman! I am—Shit!”

  The burning helicopter’s spinning plummet stopped, and Lyons’s transmission ended as he hit the black water of the canal.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Gadgets Schw
arz charged down the stairwell. A black-armored man leaned in through the security door and aimed his rifle at the Able Team commando. He shouted something, but Schwarz came on yelling, “Don’t shoot” in German. The rifleman saw a man in IESHEN Group private security garb bleeding from the scalp and screaming. His hands were raised and his empty holster flapped with each step.

  The rifleman shook his rifle and snarled something warningly. Schwarz screamed and collapsed on the landing. The rifleman spit German obscenities and grabbed Schwarz by his lapel. The Able Team warrior shoved his silencer into the man’s neck and squeezed the trigger on his Taser. The probes plunged into the gunman’s throat and he shivered and collapsed as the current racked his body. Schwarz shoved the shuddering man away and dropped his empty .45. He’d expended it getting away from security.

  Schwarz ripped his two commandeered security pistols from his pockets as a second rifleman stuck his head through the door questioningly. The gunman jerked backward as he took hits and fell. Schwarz came out the doorway and found a third man pounding down the hallway. He had his legs shot out from under him and he fell into a clattering sprawl. Schwarz ejected his spent magazines and reloaded with the two spares. He ripped away the thrashing rifleman’s tactical radio and hurled it against the wall, then yanked the man’s weapon and hefted it with satisfaction. It was longer and heavier than the short assault weapons most of the attack teams had been using. The barrel was thicker, a bipod was attached and the twin drums of a 100-round C-MAG was clipped into the Heckler & Koch Light Support Weapon feed well.

  Schwarz slid the sling of his new G-36 light machine gun over his shoulder and went back to the stairs. He had been eyeing the interior fire hoses in the main hallways. He figured them at fifty yards in length. Figuring ten yards to get to an outside window, each story roughly five yards in height.