Drawpoint

“Don’t move! Don’t move!” Lyons shouted. Over the earbud transceiver, he could hear other gunshots, muffled through the automatic volume cutout the little units incorporated. There was no time to wonder what Schwarz and Pol had gotten into now.

The gunner was trembling, trying to remove something from inside the pocket of his BDUs. Lyons, ready to shoot again if the man’s hand came out with a weapon, checked his fire when he saw the Seever unit. The man on the ground, broken from the buckshot and clearly in shock as he bled out, did not even seem to notice him. He brought the Seever device to his bandanna-covered face, coughed once, and died. The Seever slipped from his fingers onto the grass.

Lyons checked the man’s pulse to make sure he was dead, then he went to the kid, finding no sign of life. The gas can was, well, a gas can. The other item was an electronic detonator with a stubby, rubberized wireless antenna. Lyons frowned. He and the rest of the commandos from the Farm were all too familiar with this kind of technology. Such a detonator could be used to set off a bomb by wireless phone, a tactic that had been used extensively with roadside bombs during the U.S. occupation of Iraq. He looked back at the dead, masked gunner, clearly much older than the young man he’d shot—accidentally or intentionally. A few kids with gas cans looking to burn down a housing development was one thing. It was ecoterror, yes, but it did not speak to some greater design. But high-tech wireless detonators, and additional personnel…now that was something else again. Lyons didn’t like it, not one bit, and it was looking more and more like there was no fooling Brognola’s gut.

“Pol! Gadgets!” Lyons said. “Report!”

“Two down,” Schwarz reported. “I have firebombs and detonator gear here. If these guys are friends of Pinter’s, there’s an age gap.”

“Meaning?” Lyons said.

“Meaning I’m willing to bet the Farm has dossiers on these two,” Schwarz said. “They’re way too old to be idealistic greens out for a night of arson.”

“I’ve got another youngster here,” Blancanales said. “DOA. I heard the shot, followed it in. Looks like his partner, another of our youth-challenged ecoterrorists, removed him from the equation. I engaged and he’s out of the picture. I have a firebomb here wired to go, and another of those Seever units.”

“Ditto here,” Lyons said.

“What do you think, Ironman?” Schwarz asked.

“I think this is a synchronized terrorist attack with external coordination,” Lyons said. “Get pictures and transmit them to the Farm, right away. I’ll do the same. Then I’ll talk to Barb.”

“Then what?” Blancanales asked.

“We roll on the next target by priority, unless we hear otherwise. And we might. Guys, I don’t like where this is heading.”

CHAPTER FIVE

“Hal, I don’t like where this is heading,” McCarter said. “You don’t mean to say you’d leave those people?”

“I’m saying,” Brognola said patiently over the scrambled, secure satellite phone connection, “that we have mission priorities here. Will saving the deputy commissioner’s family further the mission, or will it stop us from getting to the heart of this?”

“Bloody hell, Hal!” McCarter spit. He paced back and forth outside the Range Rover, which was still parked to block the dirt road to the cement plant. The rest of Phoenix Force looked on, weapons at the ready. Gopalan remained a prisoner inside the Range Rover.

“David, I’m not insensitive to the issues at play,” Brognola told him. “But the reports coming in from Able only confirm that this goes as deep as we feared. We’ve cross-checked the IDs of the arsonists Able took down outside Chicago. Some are locals, young people with ties to environmentalist groups. The other dead are Russian-born mercenaries, one of whom is former military.”

“What the hell are Russian mercs doing working with green firebombers in the United States?”

“We don’t know the full extent of it yet,” Brognola said, “but it’s clear that the operation in India to hit the uranium plant, the political activities of World Workers United Party, and the terrorist activities of the Earth Action Front and the Purba Banglars are all likely linked. It’s the how and the why we don’t yet have. What we do know is that somehow the Earth Action Front is alerted to our interdiction efforts.”

“The Farm is compromised?” McCarter asked.

“No,” Brognola said. “But by your own account, you were anticipated in Nongstoin. If they weren’t waiting for you, they were waiting for someone, and they knew to mobilize fast. The question is, how? How deep does this go, and how far?”

“What are you saying, Hal?”

“I’m saying exactly what I said before. I’m saying that there is a conspiracy afoot here, David,” Brognola said. “As we know, it is one that links international ecoterrorism to politics in the United States, generally. Specifically, the group or groups responsible for the uranium seizure, starting with the Purba Banglars and continuing with the EAF, are the same groups, or somehow working for the same groups, that are funding the WWUP in the U.S. They’re using hardware in common. They’re armed and they’re obviously ready to use lethal force, which says they’re no longer biding their time or trying to blend in quietly. We’d have to be blind not to see the potential.”

“So you definitely think the uranium is coming to the States,” McCarter said.

“I do,” Brognola said. “We don’t yet know who’s orchestrating this. But the identifications of those you took down in Nongstoin have come back. With two exceptions, they’re locals, all of them known Purba Banglars or mercenaries known to work for terrorist groups regardless of affiliation. Two of them, however, came back as Earth Action Front operatives. Both of your EAF specimens were last reported active in Europe, in fact.”

“So the two terrorist groups aren’t just fellow travelers. They’re working in common.”

“Yes,” Brognola said. “And let’s not forget that one is a green group, while the other is Communist. For them to be working together tells me there’s some umbrella objective, something uniting them. And if they’re importing assistance all the way from Europe, and the groups are sharing advanced technology here and in the States, that speaks to heavy financing. All of it means this operation runs deep and wide. Just as we feared.”

“Not good,” McCarter said.

“Not good,” Brognola echoed. “And that is why we can’t afford to assign priorities incorrectly. You’re the field commander; it’s your call. Will rescuing the deputy commissioner’s family get us closer to the uranium? Will it help us stop it from coming to the U.S.?”

McCarter stopped and considered that. He trashed the cigarette he’d been sucking on, exhaling a plume of blue-white smoke as he retrieved the butt. “Yes,” he said finally. “Yes, it will, Hal, and I believe that. I’ll be straight with you. I don’t want to leave them hanging. But we’re dry here, and this was the most likely prospect. If we can take one or more of these blokes alive, we might be able to get ahead of the rest of this lot. They might be able to tell us where to look next, give us a better shot than an educated guess. I admit, I’m following my nose, Hal. But you know how it can be in the field. I want to see how deep this rabbit hole goes.”

“Okay. Do you know where the family is being held?”

McCarter looked to the Range Rover, where Gopalan stared out from the side window fearfully. “Not yet,” he said. “But I will in a moment.”

T HE SLUM TO WHICH an only too eager Gopalan directed Phoenix Force was as miserable as any the team members had seen in their extensive counterterrorist operations abroad. It had taken relatively little persuading to make the man talk. McCarter had simply leveled his Hi-Power at the Indian’s head and thumbed the hammer back, then asked the question. Whatever loyalty Gopalan had for the Purba Banglars, it hadn’t gone very far when his own neck was on the line. Whatever the man had been paid—McCarter would dearly have loved to know where the money was coming from, ultimately—hadn’t bought much loyalty, either.

They’d dropped Gopalan with the local Indian military police. Whether that would do any good was anybody’s guess. For all the Phoenix Force leader knew, Gopalan would be on the streets again in minutes, depending on how loudly money talked and how badly infiltrated with Purba operatives, or sympathizers, the local authorities were. Certainly the Purba Banglars had no difficulty placing an operative in the deputy commissioner’s office, where their interests could be monitored district-wide. Silently, McCarter cursed the bureaucracy that worked to the advantage of terrorists like these. If Phoenix Force had just come in and made their hit on the targets identified for them, rather than tipping their hand by following through with all the governmental and diplomatic rigmarole, things might have gone differently. But there was nothing to be done about that now. As for Gopalan, he would unlikely amount to much and had given them everything he was likely to know. He probably deserved a bullet in the brain, but the members of Phoenix Force were not cold-blooded murderers. No, giving him to the local authorities was the best route. Whatever happened to him thereafter was irrelevant to the mission at hand.

What they found inside the hovel at the street address Gopalan had given up might change the Briton’s mind. But he hoped not. There was actually a very good chance that Jignesh’s family was alive and well, at least for now. They’d hardly be much use as leverage against the deputy commissioner if they were dead. Jignesh had a lot of stones, McCarter had to admit, cluing in the team despite the danger. McCarter hadn’t told Brognola, of course, but he did feel a certain obligation to Jignesh for that. The man had put his own family on the line to stop Phoenix Force from walking blindly into a trap, knowing it was the right thing to do for his country. There was real courage there, and the way he’d done it had been fairly smart, too. A man like that was not likely simply to take the Purba Banglars’ word for what had been done with the hostages. No, he’d more than likely insist on regular proof they were alive and well. So that meant there was a good chance they still were—though perhaps not for much longer now that their activities had been exposed.

They parked the Range Rover in a fetid alley a block from the target, after taking a route around the area to survey the neighborhood. James’s sharp eyes picked out two different snipers on the rooftops. There were bound to be other guards, at ground level, but these were better hidden or simply not in evidence as the team made its recon of the area.

“Remember, mates,” McCarter said, his voice low but carrying over the team’s earbud transceivers, “this lot could get word at any time that things have gone bad for them. Maybe they already have. Keep a sharp eye out for the hostages and do not hesitate.”

A chorus of quiet acknowledgment greeted him, as each Phoenix Force member in turn spoke discreetly for his transceiver’s benefit.

“Cal, T.J.,” McCarter directed, “cut around the back of this building and retrace our route. Find those snipers and take them. See if you can spot any other guards. Remember, they may know somebody’s coming.”

“Right,” James said.

“Understood,” Hawkins said.

“Gary, you take the back,” McCarter said jerking his chin toward the ramshackle house, little better than a shanty, that leaned precariously at the opposite end of the block. It was composed of equal parts scrap wood, corrugated metal and tarps. The entire neighborhood, a claustrophobic maze of narrow alleyways and stained, crumbling structures that looked to be falling down where they stood, stank like an open sewer. Rotting garbage was piled in some of the shadowed lees of the buildings. A man was lying against one of the closer hovels, and McCarter gave him a very careful look to make sure it wasn’t a terrorist guard shamming as a drunk or a beggar. On closer inspection, however, he realized it was a body. The decay was unmistakable, even if the smell was lost among the other odors in the alley.

“Lovely,” McCarter muttered.

Manning was already on his way. McCarter motioned to Encizo. “You’re with me, mate. We’ll take the front. Let’s go.”

“Right.” Encizo nodded.

They kept their Tavor rifles low against their bodies as they went, but they made no real effort to hide the weapons. Any attempt to operate within the auspices of the Indian government had been fouled by Gopalan’s interference and Phoenix Force’s interception of him. McCarter was not about to accept another “liaison” he did not know and could not trust, so they were going to do things his way, and damn the consequences. If the Purba Banglars were sitting on the uranium and someone holding the Jignesh family knew where it was, there was no reason to delay and no point in playing bureaucratic games. McCarter preferred it that way. They passed plenty of locals, some of them dead-eyed, others alert enough to take note and hurry in the opposite direction. Places like this the world over shared a universal, overriding law. Don’t get involved. The only resistance McCarter anticipated would come from the hostage-takers themselves. He was itching to bring the fight to them.

C ALVIN J AMES WORKED his way along the alley, then forward, cutting around the sniper positions while keeping the miserable shacks between him and the enemy shooters. At the same time, Hawkins cut around the opposite side, staying low. The teammates did not have to exchange words to work effectively. They had been through scenarios like this time and again.

James had time to consider the sprawling debris around him. Slums were slums the world over. Grinding poverty like this made human life cheap and human beings desperate. It meant they were that much easier to turn, to buy off and to push around. Those they faced, be they Purba Banglar terrorists or just hired muscle off the streets of Nongstoin, would be capable of anything if the price was right.

When he had flanked the first sniper’s position, he found a stack of crates spilling over with refuse. He used these to climb up onto the rooftop of the shanty facing them. On top of the rusted, corrugated metal roof, he found a maze of clutter. Everything from wooden crates to metal and plywood additions to the huts below dotted the artificial landscape. He took full advantage of the cover to carefully cross the ramshackle roof.