Oceans of Fire

by Don Pendleton

  He really needed to get to the fourth floor, and the third would be better.

  Schwarz took the steps three at a time as he hurdled down the stairwell.

  Voices echoed upward in German Schwarz could understand.

  “Number six! He’s on number six!”

  The remote van had usurped control of the security suite and he was on camera. Schwarz ducked out of the stairwell onto the fifth floor. Men were coming down. Men were coming up, and he was in an ever-narrowing middle. He raced down the central corridor of the fifth floor and drove the butt of his LSW through the safety glass protecting the firehose. He swung out the heavy steel spool and grabbed the nozzle, unreeling hose as he ran. He didn’t want to come out at the canal, so he broke into an office suite facing north.

  Out the window the black patch of Berlin’s Tiergarten Park formed a haven of darkness in the bright lights of Berlin. Schwarz picked up a chair and hurled it at the window. It bounced off the glass with a broken armrest. He grimaced and brought his light machine gun to his hip. The G-36 snarled and spit lead. The floor-to-ceiling office window shook in its frame and cratered like the moon under the full-auto assault. Brass shell casings flew as Schwarz held his trigger down and the ten-foot pane of glass suddenly spiderwebbed with cracks between the holes.

  The G-36 clacked open on an empty chamber, its 100-round C-MAG exhausted.

  The Able Team commando snarled and hurled the smoking machine gun through the crippled glass. An entire pane ruptured and broke apart into a rain of razor-sharp shards that fell to the pavement below. Schwarz threw the nozzle of the firehose after his fallen machine gun and heaved out length after length of hose. He yanked and suddenly the hose went taut. Glass crunched beneath his boots as he stepped into the empty window frame and kicked out into the night.

  The rough canvas of the fire hose gave good purchase, and Schwarz swiftly descended the side of the IESHEN Group building. All too quickly his boots hit the bulge of the nozzle. He glanced down. He was out of hose, out of luck and still three stories off the ground. Schwarz hung for a moment and considered the two P-7 K-3 pistols tucked in his pockets. The .380 pocket pistol round they were chambered for was unlikely to get him through the industrial glass beneath his boots, and he still needed them for one last job.

  Decorative linden trees lined the street along the building’s north side. Schwarz bent his knees and kicked out from the window glass. He kicked once, twice, three times, taking him farther and farther out over the pavement. At the apogee of his fourth push Schwarz let go. Gravity enfolded him in its not-so-tender embrace, and the linden tree below seemed to rush up to meet him.

  Schwarz fell through the tree and every branch took a whack at him on the way down. His fingers closed on the uppermost branches, but they ripped through his fingers. A major bough struck him a horrific blow to the chest and blasted the air from his body. Broken branches tore at his face. His hand closed around a bough that bent beneath his weight. The bough broke and stripped away from the trunk. He never saw the pavement. He just met it.

  Schwarz lay on the sidewalk seeing stars that had nothing to do with the night sky above. He was dimly aware of Carl Lyons shouting into his earpiece, but it seemed very far away. Schwarz suddenly blinked into awareness.

  Carl was shouting “Mayday!”

  Schwarz could still feel gravity. It felt as if it wanted to suck him down through the pavement and pull him into his grave. He rolled over and pushed himself to his hands and knees. With a groan he pushed himself to his feet. God only knew how badly injured he was, but he could stand and he could breathe, and if he could do those to things he could shoot.

  Gadgets Schwarz filled his hands with his pistols and began limping down the sidewalk.

  POL BLANCANALES FLEW for his life. He was a fair pilot, but he wasn’t the prodigy that Jack Grimaldi was, nor did he do it every day for a living. The pilot following him was better, and he had a pair of door gunners shooting from both sides of the fuselage. He also had a pair of engines. The AB.139 chasing Blancanales could carry fifteen passengers at 157 knots. The Able Team warrior’s French Ecureuil helicopter was light and agile, but it had only one engine and despite his desperate wishes to the contrary, at the moment he didn’t have a pair of United States soldiers hanging out the doors on chicken straps behind M-60 E-4 general-purpose machine guns.

  Blancanales was out of luck and he knew it. All he could do was run, and as he streaked across the treed expanse of the Tiergarten, he knew all that meant was that he was going to die tired.

  Carl Lyons’s voice snarled over the open channel. Blancanales could hear the scream of rotor noise through his headset. “Mayday! Mayday! I am going down! Hal, POW! Akira, presumed POW! Tenari, KIA! Gadgets’s status unknown!”

  “Ironman!” Blancanales yanked on his stick as tracers streaked past aft. “Ironman!”

  The channel went dead.

  The Able Team commando was outpowered and outgunned. There was only one thing left to bet on.

  Guts.

  Blancanales dived for the deck. His helicopter scudded as his skids hit the treetops. He yanked back on the stick and clawed for a few yards of altitude. He kicked his collective and the little helicopter spun violently on its axis. His opponent had dived after him, but his superior skill had left him skimming inches above the trees. He had counted on that. He dipped his nose and rammed his throttles full forward into emergency power as he dove down into his opponent’s path.

  Blancanales wasn’t playing chicken. It had gone way beyond that. He was full-on attempting to ram his opponent. He was just betting that the man in the other helicopter was good enough to avoid it…but not without cost.

  The AB.139 tilted violently as the enemy pilot tried to turn out of Blancanales’s attack, but he was still too close to the trees. His rotor blades chopped into the treetops. A composite blade snapped off as it struck something too thick to chop through. The Able Team commando zoomed over the stricken aircraft and his chopper lurched as it took a hammer blow to its side. Glass flew like shrapnel through the cockpit. Blancanales fought for control as outside air rushed into the cabin in a maelstrom. The copilot’s door was staved in, and a four-foot length of rotor blade was imbedded in the frame. His skids ripped through the trees once more. He heaved back on the stick with all of his strength, and his helicopter rose above the Tiergarten.

  Red lights blinked across his board. There was a short somewhere in the electrical system and his fuel tank was ruptured, but the aircraft still obeyed his will. The enemy chopper lay on its side, cracked open and smoking in the parkland behind him. Blancanales banked the helicopter south toward the gleaming tower of IESHEN Group.

  He had a bone to pick.

  LAURENTIUS DEYN WATCHED the AB.139 helicopter slide off the top of his skyscraper and come tilting crazily out of the sky. Muzzle-flashes winked at the top of the building like fireflies as his men continued to shoot into the stricken craft. The helicopter began spinning like a Tilt-A-Whirl as control was lost. Deyn smiled with cold satisfaction as the chopper boomeranged to the ground.

  “Herr Brognola, your team is magnificent, but it is over.”

  The big Fed was sitting back in his chair. His .40-caliber Glock, his snub-nosed .44 Special Charter Arms Bulldog ankle gun and his com link sat three feet away on a foldout desk. They might as well have been a million miles out in space. Johan Mahke sat in front of Brognola with his foot on the man’s chest and his pistol in his face. Mahke was smiling, too.

  “Let me give your team’s status,” Deyn continued. “The big man? He is confirmed dead. The blond man? The team leader? He was in that helicopter that just went down. Your IT man?” Deyn pointed to a pair of panel vans pulling out of the underground parking. “We have him. He is in one of those vans.”

  Brognola’s stomach sank.

  “There is one man in your helicopter, currently being pursued. There is still one man loose in the building.” Deyn’s head tilted in mock empathy. “Oh, and we h
ave you, Herr Brognola. Tell your remaining men to surrender.”

  The Justice man clenched his teeth and said nothing.

  Deyn nodded. His sympathy was almost genuine. “I understand your dilemma, and I believe we understand each other, so I will not promise you decent treatment. We both know that would be a lie. I will find out every single thing about you, your men, and how much your government knows or suspects. So I will not make promises about what I will not do. Instead, let me promise you what I will do. I will torture every scrap of information out of your IT man. I will do it in front of you, and I will deliberately use the crudest of methods. When he has given up every secret he has, I will continue to have him tortured, to death, in a long and protracted fashion while you watch. I have some former East German security men who I keep on the payroll for just such occasions.”

  Brognola’s jaw flexed. Deyn caught the reaction and smiled. Mahke caught it, too, and hoped the man would try something stupid so he could hit him.

  “Tell your men to surrender,” Deyn repeated. “There will still be interrogations, but your cooperation will be taken into consideration when I deliberate upon your demise.” Deyn’s lips formed a hard line. All mirth left his voice. “Herr Brognola, I am not bluffing, and I will only make this offer once.”

  The big Fed understood with crystal clarity that rest of his life was going to be measured in hours marked by unendurable agony.

  “Fuck you.”

  “An unfortunate decision.” Deyn motioned to Franka Marx. “What is the situation?”

  Marx chewed her lower lip. “Forbes says he is no longer in contact with Helicopter One.”

  Mahke scowled. “Their helicopter had no weapons, how could they—”

  “They’re resourceful.”

  Brognola’s chest seemed to collapse as Mahke leaned in with his foot and made a real attempt to make his spine and sternum meet.

  Deyn raised a restraining hand. “Enough. You may continue once we have relocated.” He motioned to his driver. “I see no reason to remain here. Klaus, get Sylvan and Dieter into the van and proceed to the assembly point. Franka, tell Forbes and Zabyshny to finish the one still in the building quickly and extract. The two prisoners we have are more than enough. Send in the other two helicopters.”

  “Herr Deyn!” Klaus pointed to an IESHEN Group security man staggering down the street. As he stepped under a streetlight, they could see blood all over his uniform.

  “Have Sylvan and Dieter collect him, we must hurry from here.”

  Marx spoke into her mike and Sylvan and Dieter trotted toward the injured security guard. The guard lifted a pair of pistols and shot Sylvan and Dieter point-blank. The two men fell and the guard turned his attention to the van. The small-caliber pistols popped, and Klaus screamed and threw himself down behind the dashboard as bullets punched through the windshield and ripped apart his headrest.

  “Go! Go! Go!” Deyn roared.

  Klaus blindly rammed the van into reverse and stepped on the gas. The van lurched backward, tires squealing as bullets struck it. The driver rose in his seat and ripped the parking brake up and yanked the wheel. The van spun in a respectable bootlegger’s turn and he put the pedal down. Tires screamed as the van surged forward.

  “Scheisse!” Klaus screamed in unison with his tires.

  A mud-blackened, bloody blond thing had risen up out of the canal. One arm hung limp by its side. The other raised a pistol.

  “Scheisse!” Klaus screamed again. The van almost stood on its front tires as he rammed on the brakes. The pistol spit fire and bullets ripped through van. Franka Marx screamed. Klaus stomped on the accelerator and took the van into a tight turn.

  Mahke snarled as a bullet struck him. The pressure on Brognola’s chest eased. Marx screamed again as the big Fed lunged, seizing Mahke’s massive calf and upending him out of his seat. The man from Justice threw himself across the van and his hand curled around the rosewood grips of his Bulldog revolver. He whipped the .44 around, aiming for Laurentius Deyn’s head.

  The P-5 pistol in Deyn’s hand began blasting in rapid semiauto. Bullet after bullet hammered into Brognola’s chest. He fell back against the van’s rear door. Deyn knew the man was wearing armor but kept shooting him in the chest anyway.

  He wanted the big Fed alive.

  Deyn’s pistol clacked open on empty. Brognola raised his revolver shakily and the .44 boomed. A monitor by Deyn’s side burst into a shower of sparks. Deyn sat in his chair and reloaded. Brognola took a moment to cock his pistol and steady his aim.

  Johan Mahke’s all too familiar size-seventeen shoe slammed the Justice man against the back of the van. His huge hand enclosed both Brognola’s hand and his gun and shoved the muzzle skyward. The big Fed squeezed the trigger. Mahke roared as flame from the cylinder flashed between his fingers. Hal struggled to pull the trigger again, but even severely burned, the German giant held the pistol in a viselike grip that would not let the cylinder turn.

  Mahke’s right hand exploded into the side of Brognola’s head.

  His vision stretched and narrowed to a dark tunnel. It was lit at the edges with pulsing purple pinpricks of light. A very distant part of the big Fed’s mind remained lucid, and he threw his elbow back against the door handle behind him. The twin rear doors unlatched and suddenly fell open under his weight. Brognola fell backward. His weight was too much for the German to hold with a single burned hand. The American and his pistol ripped free as they tumbled out of the moving van.

  The van fishtailed on. Gadgets Schwarz stood in its path. He dropped his spent pistols and bent to pick up one of the security men’s fallen submachine guns. The van didn’t try to take evasive action. It bore down on Schwarz like a battering ram. The Able Team commando grit his teeth and held his ground as he held down the trigger. Bullets sprayed the front of the van. He lurched aside at the last moment but the injured member of Able Team was too slow. The corner of the van clipped him and spun him to the ground.

  Schwarz lay in the street as the van tore around the corner and disappeared from sight.

  Brognola gasped for air. Lyons crouched beside him. “Hal, you gotta get up. Do you understand? You have to get up. I can’t carry you.”

  A hand grabbed Brognola’s shoulder and hauled him to his feet. “My com link’s toast from the crash.” Lyons’s good hand patted down the big Fed’s jacket. “They took yours. Figures.” The two of them limped over to Schwarz, who didn’t look good.

  Lyons pulled his throat mike and earpiece. “Able Flight, this is Ironman. What is your situation?”

  Blancanales’s voice came through loud and clear. “I am over IESHEN Group headquarters. I have you in sight, Ironman.”

  “We’re looking for a van. They have—”

  “Ironman, I have convoys of vans heading out in three directions. What do you want me to do?”

  “They have more choppers inbound.” Brognola groaned.

  The big Fed slumped to the ground.

  Carl Lyons looked at the shattered remnants of his team. He could hear sirens a few blocks away. He knew their descriptions had been circulated to the police, and they had been described as armed and extremely dangerous. He also knew that Laurentius Deyn had the power to arrange it so that they wouldn’t last the night in custody, much less the time it would take for the Farm to take any kind of action to retrieve them.

  Lyons looked down at his broken arm. He tossed his empty pistol back into the canal. His resources were used up and his priorities were clear. Bitterness filled the Able Team leader’s soul as he spoke into the link. “Pol, we need medevac. We need it now.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Computer Room, Stony Man Farm, Virginia

  Aaron Kurtzman sat in front of a blank screen. He held his head in his hands and sorrow was etched deeply in his face. Sending Akira into the field had gone against his better instincts. From past experience he’d known it always went badly. Having Hal go to Berlin and take point command alongside the Germans ha
d also run against the grain. Still, he’d gone along with it, and now Aaron Kurtzman’s every misgiving had given birth to nightmare.

  Akira was MIA. Tino Tenari was dead. Able Team had been crushed.

  Barbara Price put a hand on his shoulder. “Aaron…”

  Kurtzman shook his head and held up a silencing hand. It wasn’t unreasonable to assume that within the next twenty-four hours every aspect of Stony Man Farm and its operations would be compromised. Which meant that the next twenty-four hours of Akira’s life would be spent in agony.

  It was likely that in forty-eight hours Akira Tokaido would be dead.

  “Aaron, we have to—”

  Kurtzman punched a button and his screen lit up. The face of Laurentius Deyn filled the screen. The computer genius gazed long and hard on the man who had become his greatest nemesis on Earth. “Barbara, Deyn was a combat swimmer for the German navy. I’m going after his military records. All of them.”

  “Aaron—”

  “He was also GSG-9, a Special Forces operative. I want his mission records, and not the redacted ones the German government will give us. I want fitness reports, after-action briefings, psych evaluations, everything.”

  “You’re talking about hacking the top-secret military databases of a U.S. ally. Hal will need to contact—”

  “Hal’s in the Berlin Embassy with a concussion.”

  “There are protocols for you to—”

  “Barbara, we don’t have time. Deyn was willing to shoot up IESHEN Group corporate and walk away. Do you understand? He’s walking away from a vast personal fortune, his whole life and career, and he doesn’t care. In a day or two the German government’s investigations will reveal that he’s dirty. He knows that, and he doesn’t seem to care about that, either. You want to know why? Because by then it’s going to be a moot point. Whatever Deyn is up to involves twenty-five nukes, and it’s already in motion.”

  “All right. The President wants a briefing. The Joint Chiefs are highly agitated about the Berlin fiasco. The reports rolling in just keep getting worse and worse. They’re calling it a goatscrew of monumental proportions, and they’re looking for someone to blame.”