CORDITE STINK SEARED LYONS'S THROAT. Raking across the parade grounds four times, he fired the first hundred rounds. He stopped, touched the receiver. The hot metal seared his fingertips, then his thumb as he clicked the fire-selector up to semi-auto. He could not risk burning out the weapon.
The M-249's recoil and vibration had numbed his face and arms. Despite the suppressor and the ear-plugs he wore, his head rang. He took a few deep breaths as he watched the panic far below him.
He felt more than saw someone move behind him. Thumbing back his Python's hammer, he spun, only to see the girl crouching behind him. She had left her position to watch the slaughter.
"Go! Watch for comunistas!" he shouted at her. He pointed to the plugs in his ears. "I can hear nothing. Stand guard."
Lyons put his eye to the scope and scanned the parade grounds. Inside barracks, flashes blew out windows. A half second later, he heard the pops of 40mm grenades. Blancanales and Gadgets were hitting the camp with their M-16 / M-203 grenade launchers, firing and reloading and firing, sending fragmentation and white phosphorous into barracks and offices.
Through the Leatherwood's optics, he saw the terrorists finally raise their Kalashnikovs. They fired wild at the mountainside where Lyons hid. He sighted the cooled M-249.
He fine-tuned the trajectory cam ring, adjusting the framing bars for the slight difference in range from the parade grounds to the barracks. He sighted on the chest of an OD green-uniformed terrorist and squeezed off a round. The terrorist staggered back. Lyons fired again and again, killing a terrorist with each shot. He tried a head shot, missed.
He took his eye from the scope and looked down at the camp. He watched the black smoke pouring from a barracks. The smoke drifted to the southwest. He glanced downslope to the treetops and saw the branches sway with a gentle breeze. Putting his eye back to the ocular, he corrected slightly upwind and sent a slug into the face of a terrorist. He tried another head shot, missed.
Don't be a show-off, Lyons told himself.
With rapid fire he punched 5.56mm holes in terrorists' chests and backs. He saw the white flash of a phosphorous grenade scatter several soldiers from cover. Lyons shot three. He saw two others jerking and thrashing as metallic phosphorous burned into their chests and skulls, but he did not waste cartridges on them.
On the far side of the camp, a pilot ran for a helicopter. A group of soldiers dashed from cover to cover, Kalashnikovs in their hands. They gathered their comrades, some with rifles and RPG-7 launchers, others with no weapons. Through the scope, Lyons saw a black man with an AK shove a panicked, bleeding soldier away from the helipad. Lyons killed the black, then two other soldiers in the side door of a French Alouette III helicopter.
But the copters' prefab steel hangar screened the other Alouette from his fire. He dug the protective plug out of his ear, then keyed his hand-radio. "Wizard! Wizard!"
In the seconds that he repeated his call again and again, he heard AK slugs ripping through the trees. He ignored them. None came close.
A blast threw flame and debris. An RPG rocket left a flaming hole three feet wide and twenty feet long in the mountainside's brush and small trees. Six inches of wood from a large pine had been splintered away. He could not ignore that. Anywhere an RPG hit was too close.
"Wizard! Fire those Vipers. Hit that scum! They're getting organized."
Another RPG screamed into the mountainside a hundred feet wide of him. He shouted into the hand-radio again. "Wizard. Hit them."
"Just a second," Gadgets answered calmly. "They're loading up the helicopter. I'm waiting for a full bus. All right!"
Simultaneous blasts wiped away the French helicopters, the hangar and the fuel depot. Aviation fuel and munitions exploded in a vast churning ball of flame.
"Hey, man!" Gadgets raved. "Think that shook them? Here come four more.... "
A wave of flame and debris flashed across the camp. Striking waist-high, the four carefully targeted rockets hit two barracks, an office and the blazing ruins of the hangar. The blasts scattered sheet steel shrapnel.
Blancanales's voice came on. "The kid and I are pulling out. Don't let anyone follow us."
Lyons watched the black smoke billowing from the fires. The south-westerly breeze had faded. Then he returned his eye to the optics. He braced the weapon with his left hand around the stock's titanium tubing, exhaled as he held the forehead of a terrorist in the cross hairs. The terrorist officer scanned the mountainsides with binoculars. Lyons squeezed off the shot.
Shattered lens glass sparkled in the air. The dead man fell back.
Firing the last three cartridges of the first belt, Lyons tore open another plastic magazine. He pulled out his ear protection and listened for the girl. He did not hear her.
Lyons plugged his ear again and threaded in the next cartridge belt. He searched the wrecked and burning camp for targets. He killed crawling wounded, shot exposed legs and shoulders, played peekaboo with an RPG gunner. He missed twice, then the gunner fired a rocket and missed Lyons.
The gunner lunged out once again, his launcher on his shoulder, but ducked back as Lyons fired a single shot. The bullet missed, the gunner lunged out to fire, and Lyons triggered a five-round burst. The gunner flew back, dead, the rocket flying wild, self-destructing at 3,000 feet above the earth.
Rifle slugs continued ripping through the trees. Lyons sought out the AKs. The scope's aspect slid over the faces of the terrorist army—Europeans, blacks who would certainly be Africans, black and white Americans, Hispanics, Asians. Most of them sprawled in the dust and gravel of the camp, dead or dying. Others searched for Lyons over the sights of Kalashnikov rifles. Lyons found them first.
He put the cross hairs on a face displaying tribal scars. He saw a pretty European woman with her hair in stylish pincurls. He also saw a Hispanic wearing a Castro-style beard. Then a girl with American Indian features. None would return home.
A blur of motion made Lyons look up from the scope. He saw a truck careering through the camp's streets. A man with Slavic features jumped from the cab's passenger side to roll aside the chain link gate. Lyons put a burst through his chest and head. He shifted his aim to the truck and punched holes through its windshield, engine and radiator. He sighted on the fuel tanks on the side. His bullets tore open the metal. Pools of diesel fuel spread around the truck.
A line of orange tracers jackhammered the mountainside. Lyons heard the fire of a 12.7mm heavy machine gun. Branches and leaves fell around him as if an invisible chainsaw slashed the trees.
Scanning the compound and guard towers, he found the weapon's muzzle-flash. Before he could pull the trigger on the target, a 40mm frag arced into the side of the guard position. A blinded terrorist thrashed in the open guard-tower window. He fell over into the crossbars of the tower and hung there. The other guard sprayed more slugs at Lyons.
"Ironman!" Blancanales called through the radio. "You up there? You all right?"
Putting a burst through the sentry in the tower, Lyons keyed his radio. "What do you need?"
"I thought you'd been hit."
"No."
Another RPG blasted the mountainside. Lyons squinted against the dust. He threw open the weapon's feed cover. He wiped the action. The hot metal scorched the cloth. When he squirted oil into the receiver, it smoked.
He watched the camp. No terrorists left cover. No other trucks tried to race the gate. Slugs continued snapping through the trees, but few now. No more rocket fire came.
An M-1 popped behind him. Grabbing his silenced Colt, Lyons peered into the brush and listened. The M-1 popped again. Auto fire replied. Crawling from , his sandbagged trench, Lyons wormed silently through the mountainside's growth.
He saw green-uniformed soldiers thrashing through the brush. One dragged a wounded comrade to the safety of rocks. A .30-caliber slug slapped into the man's back as he crouched. The two other terrorists, a sunburned Northern European with crew-cut white-blond hair and a thick-necked Hispanic woman, shoute
d to each other in Russian. The blond man fired a long burst from his Uzi as the woman pitched a grenade.
Lyons killed them both with .45 hollow points to their heads. The grenade sent slivers of steel zipping through the trees.
"Maria!"
Crawling again, Lyons went to the wounded terrorists and finished them. He crouch-walked through the tangled brush, pausing behind pines, watching for a movement. Finally he found Maria.
Sitting against a tree, she held her intestines with her left hand, pointed her carbine with her right. A second wound through her leg poured blood into the soil.
He forced his face to show nothing. Easing the girl back to reduce shock, Lyons talked quietly and slowly, saying nothing, talking only to calm.
Maria did not respond to his English. She stared into the forest around them, her eyes darting from place to place. Her breathing remained strong.
Taking her hand away, Lyons examined her gut wound. A fragment had slashed her side, laying open a flap of flesh and exposing her abdominal membranes. Though he saw intestines under the membrane, the gash did not continue into her abdominal organs.
He covered the wound with a field dressing and put her hand over the bandage to hold it in place. He examined her leg wound. A 9mm slug had passed through her left calf. When he felt the bones, she screamed, thrashed. His fingers found the mismatched ends of a bone.
"Come on, Maria." Lyons lifted her in his arms. "You're going to be all right, but you can't stay here."
She did not drop her carbine. Lyons shouldered her through the brush, running and lurching across the mountainside. Crying out, Maria opened her eyes wide, stared, as if watching for other attackers. Lyons avoided a ten-yard-wide slab of bare, open rock. Keeping to the shadowy pines, he thrashed through the last few branches and put her down beside his emplacement.
"Pol, Wizard," he called into his hand-radio. "Maria's hurt. Doctor time, right now. Move it."
Looking downhill, he saw terrorists sprinting across the camp to drag comrades to safety, to grab weapons. Others sprinted for the gate. Lyons touched the M-249. The barrel and receiver had cooled.
"We're two hundred yards below you," Blancanales said. "We heard a fire fight up there."
"Yeah. They're dead, she's hit. Nine millimetre, lower leg. Simple fracture of a bone. Gut wound, left side. She'll live but she needs a hospital."
"We'll take her out with us. How about you? What's the problem? I see them moving."
Lyons jammed his weapon closed, gave Blancanales a quick jive line. "Hey, companera, like, you know, it's cool now."
He saw the girl push herself upright against one of his improvised sandbags. Her face white with shock, she braced her M-1 over her good leg and sat there watching the approach behind them. Lyons reached over to her to grip her hand. He felt her fragile, long-fingered hand shaking.
"You're hard-core, Maria. Don't worry. We'll get you out. I promise."
When he took his hand away, he saw her blood on his palm. He did not stop to wipe it away. Snapping back the action to feed a round, Lyons put his eye to the scope of his automatic weapon. What he saw, he killed.
19
Texas
Saturday
6:00 a.m.
(1300 Greenwich mean time)
IN A CAVERNOUS HANGAR at Houston International Airport, the men of Phoenix Force waited. Outside, jetliners roared away as commercial flights carried early-rising Texans to the cities of the United States and Central America. But the Phoenix Force crew went nowhere. They waited.
Manning and McCarter paced, McCarter kicking a cola can across the hangar's oil-stained concrete. Ohara sat on a folding chair, his back straight, his hands folded in his lap, his face serene. He seemed to sleep.
On the far side, Yakov rushed into an office. "This is inexcusable! Where are the helicopters? Where is the officer responsible for this...."
Yakov's voice faded as the office door swung shut. David McCarter laughed.
"Those bastards will moan this day. Feel like giving them a what-for myself."
"Let the colonel handle it," Gary Manning told him. "Bet those choppers are shuttling some bloody general and his staff to his golf game."
"You're on!" McCarter told him.
"What?"
"How much?"
"No, you don't! No more bets with me. Never again."
"In for a hundred bucks."
"Not against me—''
"I say the general's still out whoring. Instead of watching for those low-flying Cuban buggers, he's out buggering—"
"I said no!"
Ohara opened his eyes, blinked as the English rowdy shouted into Manning's face, "Then you're in default. Pay up!"
"I didn't bet—"
"You said you bet."
"A figure of speech—"
"Figure of speech, bull. You're trying to worm out of it now. What you were doing was trying to cheat Keio. Figured you suck him into it, then take his pay."
"Forgive me," Ohara apologized. "But what do you speak of? I don't understand to what you refer."
"That Englishman's got salt water on the brain," Manning answered.
"Listen to that," groaned McCarter. "You're the wily one. Look, just pay up. You can afford to be honourable with your debts, I made you enough money the other weekend—"
"What money?"
"Don't you 'what money' me. From the race."
McCarter gave Manning a brotherly slap on the shoulder that would have knocked down most men. "The race! In Kent!"
Manning grinned. "Somehow managed to keep it, too."
"A competition?" Ohara asked.
"If you could call it that," Manning answered. "It was his idea. I'm in Kent, England, trying to get a proper rest and he tells me about the local marathon. With the low quality of the Kent runners, McCarter thinks I can win it. He didn't realize there were others who could play that game too."
McCarter broke in. "Manning could've beaten the local boy without working up a sweat. But the pub owner had this 'nephew,' he said—"
"Some 'nephew'. Six-foot-six with legs by Ferrari."
"Those legs helped the odds. I got ten to one on our Canuck of the North—"
"Get rich fast. Invest in Canada. I put three hundred pounds on myself."
"Then Manning asked me where to ambush a runner," McCarter said. "Truly turned my head, the thought of a proper Canadian bloke resorting to head bashing."
"I just thought the local boys would bash my head for what Trudeau did to the queen."
"Who is Trudeau?" Ohara asked. "What did he do to the queen?"
"Said Canada might not print her face on its money anymore," laughed McCarter. "So Manning's telling me to wait until the pack goes by, because he'll be last, then he gives me another three hundred to bet. Tells me he's running last and then he bets more.... I thought he'd been soaking his head in maple syrup—"
"I ran last because of the weather. Awful, cold, stormy," explained Manning to the Japanese, "The pack of runners takes off from the start like they're all sprinters. I let gravity carry me. I keep my legs cool. Then come the last few miles, when the course goes uphill, and they can't keep their pace. They slow down, their muscles cramp up with the cold. Two or three drop out. I'm gaining on the others. Then comes the ambush."
"Someone attempted to attack you?" Ohara asked in complete innocence. "During a sporting event? Did you call the police?"
"I called McCarter." Manning laughed.
"These two bloody bastards jumped out of the woods at Manning," McCarter said. "So I jumped out of the woods too. One of the bushwhackers goes down holding his jewels, the other one goes down holding his head. Manning sprints for the prize."
"What was your time for the distance?" Ohara asked.
"Who cared? Nobody cared," Manning said. "We wanted the money. I come in first. While I trot off for a hot soak to keep my muscles from knotting up, McCarter collects the money."
"But they didn't want to pay! Those Kentish sods thoug
ht we'd cheated them."
"I walked into the pub, and the pub lord's raving about us 'interfering' with his nephew. We had no idea what had happened to the nephew."
"And the two buggers from the woods are standing right there, calling us cheating foreigners. Me, an Englishman!" McCarter snorted.
"I pointed the two men out," Manning said. "Told the people to question them if they wanted to know what happened to the nephew. Wrong thing to say. After a moment, I realized Mr. McCarter and I would need to conduct the debate back-to-back, that is, by the 'Alley Rules of Discourse.' "
"They rushed us like a pack of devils. We took some bruising, it was nip and tuck there for a while, us two against about fifty of those sods."
"Yeah," said Manning, "but sportsmanship prevailed."
"In other words, they all stood in line to get a swing at us—"
"When the scene calmed down," Manning continued, "we searched for the two ambushers through all the unconscious and bleeding citizens, and then we dragged them out—"
"And we knocked their heads together, we did. Interrogated them on the spot. Seems they tripped the poor little nephew and removed him from the race. Had no problem collecting our money after that—"
"Yeah, the debate ended," said Manning. "God save the queen."
All heads turned at once. The whup of rotors throbbed through the metal walls of the hangar. Yakov left the office and limped toward the hangar doors.
"If the general's got his golf shoes on," McCarter shouted to Yakov, "Manning wins a hundred bucks."
"What are you jabbering about?" the Israeli demanded, venting his impatience and frustration.
"The Canuck knows where our helicopters have been."
"Oh, yes? Perhaps he also knows where the Cuban aircraft landed? He should inform me, so that I can inform the United States Air Force."
Yakov slammed open a corrugated steel door and stepped out into brilliant sunlight. McCarter followed him out. Shielding his eyes against the light, McCarter saw the silhouettes of helicopters descending from the sky.
Air Force markings identified the Huey. McCarter shouted to the others.
Super Bolan - 001 - Stony Man Doctrine Page 15
