Ramrod intercept, p.9
Ramrod Intercept, page 9
Godwin was on his feet, heard himself begging for the man not to do it, there was some mistake, he’d make it right. The eyes were nailing him as soon as he started flapping his lips, judging him as he squawked for mercy, then he saw the submachine gun coming up, its nose flaming. He felt the impact of bullets tearing into him, a fiery pain carving him up, driving him down. He heard the cry of his own horror and pain, ripping out—the injustice and insanity of it all—then fading out to some dark, soundless point far away, calling him down. Then the black curtain dropped over his eyes, telling Miles Godwin he was already gone.
CHAPTER NINE
Blancanales had been volunteered by Lyons for the dubious honor of moving in on their quarry from the east. While Schwarz went through the front door, Lyons scaling the long flight of steps toward the balcony from the west, Blancanales crept in at damn near a snail’s pace, Colt Commando up and searching for enemy meat. The problem, the way he saw it, was the rocky precipice, the house nearly jutting out over the cliffside, right on top of Pol. One errant step, and Blancanales would find himself doing a header off the cliffside, a straight swan dive some hundred feet or more for the bed of boulders getting a harsh pounding by the sea far below him.
Already he heard the shooting from beyond the balcony, at some point inside what he figured was the living room. A man and a woman, screaming for their lives to be spared, then the unmistakable stammer of the crazy ex-colonel’s Uzi.
Lake, no doubt, had gone berserk once more.
The second problem, going in, was Able Team had no fix on the number of shooters on the premises. Judging the seating capacity of the combined vehicles out front, assuming one of them belonged to the late lady of the house, and he surmised a ballpark figure of eight, ten shooters tops.
Any more armed buzz cuts in the wings, and they were pushing lady luck to throw them a beanball to the head.
He didn’t think they built homes on the cliffside, raised on stilts in California anymore, due in no small part to the wrath of Mother Nature. An earthquake, or a mudslide, and the whole structure would go plunging for the Pacific, crushed to matchsticks on the rocks below. It didn’t really matter in his final analysis what the architecture, but he needed to take a few more treacherous steps farther out on the precipice if he was to line up his own shooting gallery.
Lyons wanted a straight bulldozer approach, nothing but heavy metal thunder, gloves off. Well, let there be rock and roll, Blancanales thought, easing away from the balcony, the sound of pounding footsteps washing over him from above.
And he lined up two heads out of the gate.
The shorter version of the M-16 raised, Blancanales took up slack on the trigger and went to work. The first two lines of 5.56 mm slugs stitched one, then number-two hardman up the crotch, zipping crimson holes on the way up to savage windpipes to ragged meat. Now that he had their attention, as a shadow gunmen leaned over the railing and started winging out the subgun fire, he scampered beneath the balcony. The muzzle velocity of his Colt Commando rounds was in the neighborhood of 880 meters per second. Plenty of punch to get them tap dancing as he sprayed the flooring of the balcony beneath their feet. He got lucky, drawing third blood, making somebody sing soprano, as a piercing howl was swept out to sea, then heavyweight hammered off the deck. He had to have nailed a foot, maybe cleaved off a pair of family jewels, since the thrasher above was cursing vicious enough to make this week’s rapper flash-in-the-pan blush.
A moment later, he became aware of the stammering autofire from the stairs to the west.
Lyons was hard at work himself, squeezing down the lead clamp.
Blancanales wished the big guy luck, but knew Ironman had a way of creating his own unique brand of charm.
LYONS WAS HALFWAY up the steps, mentally kicking around the architect genius who decided a raised balcony, this stairway to heaven—giving an eagle’s-nest view of the Pacific for as far as the eye could see—might up the market value of this patch of real estate. He didn’t even bother counting the number of steps, just swiftly hauled his bulk up higher, closing down, the heads of two goons coming into sight when the screaming and the shooting inside the house started, then ended abruptly.
Blancanales got the killing match for the home side under way, chopping up two sea-gapers closest to the railing. They came running through the balcony door next, Lyons meeting Lake’s wild-eyed stare for a brief moment.
“You guys again! I’m getting real tired of you assholes! You’re like that one fly in the room you can never get rid of!”
And Lyons let his Colt Commando do the talking for him. Another buzz-cut issue was toppling, Lyons figuring Pol was rearranging the deck from below, the hardman’s foot all but disappearing in a dark crimson mist. Lake was holding his ground, the defiant one again, triggering his Uzi, and Lyons was forced to duck as lead sailed over his scalp. The deck getting a lead termite savaging made them change their evacuation strategy as Lake surged back through the balcony doorway. Lyons bolted up two more steps, glimpsed a hardman lugging a briefcase and hit him in the chest with ten to twelve rounds. The guy was dancing back, hosing the sky with his HK MP-5, twitching and gaping out his shock and horror. Momentum and the impact of Lyons’s crashing lead wall sent him bulling on his way through the railing, briefcase sailing out to the dark night.
“No! You bastards!”
Lake. Catching the sight of whatever goodies were in the briefcase going down the cliff, Lyons gathered, to be swallowed up by the sea.
No time to cry that even the good guys were striking out all over the map, losing songbirds and high-tech merchandise over half of L.A.
Any butt-chewing was on the backburner for later, when Brognola got the scorecard, and found Able Team had struck out when the bases were loaded.
Zero stoolies.
Shit happened.
Lyons topped the steps, and pinned the fallen hardman with a 3-round burst to the chest. He was moving for the open entrance when Lake, all bellows and curses, hosed the jamb, smashing out the glass with tracking autofire. With any luck, Lyons figured Schwarz was right now rolling in on the enemy’s six, going for the blind-side slice and dice.
SCHWARZ HIT THE FOYER running. He was surging around a corner, spotting them folding in a human wave back into the living room, when he gave them another rude jolt, mowing down three hardmen with a long burst of dicing autofire. Lake was either blessed with pure dumb luck, or some unholy dark angel was holding the guy’s hand, Schwarz thought. Somehow, he was hemmed in by a phalanx of his shooters, by chance or design, Schwarz couldn’t say. By the time Schwarz tagged the trio, dropped them, crimson human dominoes, Lake was a bolt of lightning, dashing around the corner of some adjacent room.
Three shooters left, and they proved hell-bent on covering the insane ex-colonel’s flight out of there. He figured Lake was searching for another avenue out of the house, a garage perhaps.
Then the ex-colonel rejoined his hard force, directed a sudden burst that nearly scalped Schwarz. A trickle of blood hit Schwarz in the eye, as he flung himself for immediate refuge behind the couch that marked the final resting place of their last and very late songbird, and playmate.
“I don’t know who you assholes are, but you can’t beat the colonel!”
Schwarz hugged the carpet as lead hit the couch with a drumming thud.
“You girls don’t understand one simple fact of life! Even God has sympathy for the devil! God just can’t stand the guy’s pride! Or maybe the devil’s a woman! Imagine that! Makes sense to me!”
“Oh, man,” Schwarz muttered to himself. “This joker’s out there. Fruitcake.”
The leadstorm abated in lessening degrees, as a cry of pain lashed the air and they started pulling their aim. Schwarz crabbed a few yards farther down the couch, then popped up in time to see Lyons had swung his assault rifle low around the balcony entrance to score a castrating crotch shot on a buzz-cut issue. The guy was hopping back, the HK MP-5 falling from hands more concerned with caressing the source of his misery, the end of his bloodline. Lyons eased his pain forever in the next moment with a rising burst to his chest, flinging him into a stereo cabinet.
Two shooters were dropping back, alternating their subgun sprays toward the balcony, then the couch. Schwarz caught a face full of blood as wild rounds tore into a corpse on the other side.
Standoff, while Lake fled, he knew.
A fresh clip cracked home, and Schwarz poured it on, chasing the shooters to cover in the adjoining room. When Blancanales’s Colt Commando poked through the entrance, opposite Lyons’s blazing weapon, three streams of autofire merged, eating up the wall, then scoring flesh. A belched grunt of pain, and the follow-up crash of a body told Schwarz they were nailing it down.
That left one shooter.
“Carl!” Schwarz shouted above the racket of auto-fire. “I’m going after Lake!”
Lyons was his typical understanding and compassionate self, Schwarz thought, and felt the grim smile hit his lips as his teammate roared, “So, get your ass moving! We’ll finish this one scumbag!”
“WHO ARE YOU calling scumbag? You’re talking to a goddamn air commando hero!”
Lyons hadn’t intended to get the guy riled up any more than he already was, or push some emotional button to stoke his rage into a fatal careless move. But it happened that way, and Lyons had the self-proclaimed hero dead to rights.
He came cursing out of the dining room, all snarls and flaming subgun. Unfortunately for the raging braggart, he borrowed one too many pages from Lake’s manual on anger management and reckless rebellion in the face of long odds, and flunked the whole course.
“I got more commendations and medals than you got hair on your nuts!”
“Nuts this!” Lyons roared back, and slung the barrel of his assault rifle low around the edge of the jamb. Holding back on the trigger as a round slashed the assault rifle and nearly ripped it from his hand, Lyons fired blind, marking the voice, mentally gauging the suicide march. The shooter’s rounds were suddenly going high and wide, the sound of rage and agony reaching rock-concert decibels. A quick look and Lyons found he’d scored a knee. It was over in the next flung curse, as Blancanales assisted Lyons in a twelve-to-fifteen-round overkill, scything the hardman to scarlet ribbons, a dancing puppet that didn’t want to go down. Before the boneless sack was even plunging for the final fall, Lyons and Blancanales were charging across the living room, homed in on the double stutters of autofire out front.
SCHWARZ WAS FORCED to beeline for the cover of some dense shrubbery. He was off the steps, veering for dicey cover, at best, as Lake leaned out the window of his Towncar, sweeping a long burst, reversing it out of there. Lights out, Lake held back on the trigger of his Uzi. Schwarz felt the slipstream of hot lead hornets buzzing past his ears, the foliage eaten up, in his face.
“Try me on for size in Idaho, honey!”
Everything but an I-dare-you, Schwarz thought, plowing through the undergrowth as he heard tread shriek and claw at concrete, the roar of the engine seeming to grow louder by the second.
Schwarz came out of the brush, moved on down the driveway in a loping roll, triggering his Colt Commando. One second he was sure he had Lake’s face lined up, then there was nothing but a shadowy veil as the guy’s long mane flowed up when he dropped to a hunch beneath the steering wheel. Schwarz drilled three, maybe four spiderwebbed holes across the windshield, then the Towncar was whipping past the gate, an angry crush of brakes sliding it deeper into the darkness of the road beyond. A roar of the powerful engine, and the vehicle vanished.
Schwarz heard his teammates running up. He turned, looked at Ironman and Pol, both of them steaming in silence, mirror images of the frustration and anger he choked on.
“This guy’s starting to really bug me,” Lyons growled.
Lake was already long gone, and Schwarz knew by the time they retraced their steps to the van he would be well on his way.
“Idaho,” Schwarz said.
“What?” Lyons growled.
“This guy’s got a pair the size of Godzilla. Get this,” he added, and relayed Lake’s parting quote.
“Is that right?” Lyons said. “Well, I’ve always liked a challenge. Especially when the opposition’s got a bulldog way that makes me look neutered.”
“But will Hal get it past the Man?” Blancanales said.
“Speaking of Hal,” Schwarz stated, “who’s going to be the messenger of all the bad news?”
FOLLOWING LYONS’S update and signing off to await further orders, Brognola hung his head. Sitting in a chair at Kurtzman’s workstation, the big Fed sounded off a chuckle that rolled and hung like a death knell in the Computer Room, ripping out from a belly full of grim anxiety that would need a full packet of antacid tablets to smooth out. Two missions launched, well under way, but problems were rearing ugly doomsday mugs so fast the Justice man figured he might need a calculator to keep score on all the snafus.
“Why am I not surprised it went to hell in Hollywood?” Brognola posed to no one in particular.
“It sounds like Able had no choice,” Kurtzman offered.
They were monitoring the situation, via satellite, in Madagascar. It was already bombs away on the garrison, and Brognola needed to focus on Phoenix Force. For the next few hours, Able Team was on hold.
“Lyons said Lake came right out and damn near challenged them to try and hit the Idaho facility,” Kurtzman said. “I say we get them cut loose, Hal. It’s clear DYSAT is dirty. Time to send in the cleaning crew.”
“As soon as Phoenix is wheels up, I’ll get in touch with the Man,” Brognola said. “We’ve made some preliminary arrangements on an incursion into the Idaho facility, right, Barbara?”
“All that needs to be done is to fly in the special package Gadgets requested,” Price answered. “Beef up their ammo at the same time. It can be done in a few hours from our end.”
“If,” Tokaido said, “the President allows us to move on what he still thinks is a legitimate classified military facility.”
“Able’s up against a bunch of black-op, mad-dog killers,” Brognola said, chomping down on his cigar. “I’ll convince the President to give us the green light, don’t you worry.”
But Brognola wasn’t so sure he could sell the plan of having Able Team storm the gates of the DYSAT complex, which was funded, in large part, by the Pentagon’s Special Access Programs. Brognola had some grim experience in the past with black projects, Striker having dismantled in his own way classified military high-tech sanctuaries that believed they were above the laws of man and God. It would be a hard sell.
“Okay, people, let’s focus on Phoenix for now.”
And, Brognola thought, keep their fingers crossed the five commandos pulled off the seeming impossible. Sudan was up and on the board next, but the big Fed didn’t even want to begin dwelling on Striker kicking ass and taking names, while traipsing around countryside that was as hostile to the West as the worst in Iran or Afghanistan. Striker, all but hung out there, alone, on his own.
One man, on deck, against God only knew how many thugs, cutthroats and killers, saboteurs and double agents. Brognola quietly chuckled to himself as he recalled what Bolan had told Barbara.
He’d figure it out.
So, Brognola thought, what was new?
CHAPTER TEN
Madagascar
Gary Manning made his decision for Big Brother, God, country, the free world and—last but hardly least—Phoenix Force to take the opening shots, bring down two heavies off the bat. It was only the grim beginning, the first of several snatch-ups of bad guys for Phoenix, he hoped, to tow back across the Atlantic for hard justice, Uncle Sam style. The justice end of any bagging of known killers here, of course, would ultimately fill only the eye of the judicial beholder, would come down in due course from the gavel of, hopefully, a hardballing judge.
Already he could see the media feeding frenzy when the smoke cleared and the stench of death and destruction here wafted all the way back to the States. He could already hear all the talking heads squawking every night on end over the moral prerogative of American military muscle squeezing the clamps on “alleged” international terrorists, all that who was really who and what was really right.
Not his problem.
The talking heads and Monday-morning quarterbacks weren’t here on the firing line, probably never had much more to worry about in their day aside from what four-star restaurant they’d sashay into, and they could kindly kiss his Canadian ass. Like the other commandos of Phoenix Force, being a deniable expendable for covert operations out of Stony Man Farm damn near ranked him as a ghost with a license to kill, nothing more or less.
Five killing shadows, indeed. No headlines, no glory, nothing but pure guts on this end, and the knowledge of a job well done, that the world might be a little safer, brighter place when the mission was wrapped.
Manning’s sniping task was about to end all discussion before it started. When he did it, they would need a doctor first, and soon, plus a heavy dose of painkiller for what he had them lined up for. In the plus column for the big Canadian, there would be no tense scene in the office of some wet-behind-the-ears D.A. two months out of Yale and who believed the glove didn’t fit, had to acquit. No judge spouting off how he violated their constitutional rights, bleating out the nonsense, such as where did he get off torturing suspects, denying them medical attention, all that crazy shit that made the legal community go hunting for the scalps of men who put their lives on the line to dump the scum on their doorstep for what was, sadly, all too often a gentle slap on the wrist.
The choices were everywhere, no question, bursting out of the barracks, scurrying pell-mell from the disintegrating rubble of radar and tracking structures, and Manning made the first call of many in the name of justice.
So many savages. So few bullets.
The face of the Sudanese general was a picture of utter panic, so close in the mounted telescopic sight, it looked as if Manning could reach out and touch him.
