Unified Action

The high-altitude wind had stacked eastern storm clouds up on the elevated geography behind them and a cold rain had begun to fall. In the same instant contact with their communication satellite had vanished. Then as they made their initial approach into the village they had realized a battle had just occurred within the small populated area.

They were now operating blindly in an extremely hazardous environment. The thought of abandoning the mission had never been discussed. There was still a hostage out there in the middle of this mess.

The falling rain was a blanket of white noise. The Phoenix Force warriors remained ghostly figures as they traversed the cemetery. The weight of their weapons were reassuring in their hands. They breathed in the humid air, feeding their bodies through the exertion.

The first rifle crack was muted and distant. McCarter went down to one knee behind a headstone. Instantly, James did the same, followed by Manning and Encizo.

The Briton strained his ears against the muffling effect of the heavy rain. He heard another single shot of rifle caliber. A burst of submachine gun fire answered it, and McCarter saw the flash of muzzle fire flare out of the dark rectangle of a window in the second story of a compound ahead of them.

McCarter quickly ascertained that none of the fire was being directed toward their position.

“What the hell is going on?”

“Internal coup for command?” James offered in a whisper. “Could be a blood feud, I guess. Everything is tribal politics this far up in the mountains.”

McCarter nodded. “Let’s try to use the chaos to our advantage.”

They were about fifty yards from the edge of the settlement where thatch and mud hovels surrounded the more built-up areas in a loose ring broken by animal pens. McCarter wiped rain water out of his eyes and looked toward the irrigation ditch that had been his original infiltration route.

He scowled. He wasn’t bursting with anticipation to slide into the muddy, waist-deep water of the ditch. Another burst of submachine gun fire came from the compound’s second story and was answered by two controlled single shots.

He rose from behind the headstone and began moving toward the village proper. Behind him his teammates rose and followed, keeping their formation loose and broken but still maintaining overlapping fields of fire.

The team dodged the open graves, artillery craters and headstones like runners navigating hurdles on the quarter-mile track. The soaked ground swallowed up the impact of their footsteps, spraying water with every step they took.

McCarter reached the round wall of a mud hovel and went around one side of it. He peeked out and saw an unpaved alley running deeper into the village. Bullet holes riddled the wall of one long, low, mud-brick building. A mongrel lay, shot dead, in the weeds beside it.

“I’m going to move forward then wave you up once it’s clear,” he instructed James. The ex-SEAL nodded as Encizo and Manning took up defensive positions to secure the Briton’s infiltration.

McCarter pushed forward. The alley ran past the back of the compound several blocks up. Trash bins lay overturned in the muddy street and rubbish was heaped everywhere. McCarter stayed close to one side of the building and edged his way carefully into the street. His eyes squinted against the rain, searching windows and doorways for any sign of movement.

There was no more gunfire. The rain was even louder adjacent to the structures of the village. It hammered onto shanty roofs of corrugated tin and ran off into makeshift gutters, forming rushing waterfalls that splashed out into the street every few yards. McCarter wiped water from his eyes and stalked farther into the tangle of dank and twisting streets.

He crossed an open area between two one-story buildings and sensed motion. He spun, bringing up his carbine. A black-and-white goat on the end of a frayed rope looked up and bleated at him. The little animal’s fur was matted down with exposure to the rain. There was a little hutch built behind the staked goat. From the doorway of the hutch a slender arm and hand sprawled in the mud. There was a bracelet of hammered metal around the delicate wrist and the fingers had frozen in rigor mortis.

McCarter looked up the street in both directions but saw nothing. He crouched and reached across with his left hand to his right boot and pulled a Gerber Guardian straight blade from his boot sheath. He stepped into the pen, ignoring the squish of mud and shit in the straw under his feet.

The animal bleated again and McCarter shushed it reflexively. He reached down and slid the double-edged blade into the loop of twine around the animal’s neck. He flicked his wrist and severed the rope. The goat walked to the edge of the pen and began munching on the straw that had been out of its reach before.

McCarter slowly sank to one knee. He slid the Gerber back into its boot sheath and bent forward, looking into the hutch. The shadows were deep in the tiny space. He saw the arm running back into the dark. McCarter blinked and the shadow resolved into the shape of a woman.

She was young and dead, with opaque eyes staring out at him. There was a bloody open gash in her forehead where a bullet had punched in. He looked away.

McCarter rose slowly out of his crouch. He heard a man call out several streets over and he froze. The language was French. Someone farther out from that answered him in the same language. Anger made McCarter grit his teeth. He swallowed a lump of bile that had formed like a rock in his throat.

Despite his anger he was more concerned by the mystery of the European voice. He had to keep his mind on the operation, focus his thoughts.

The men who had murdered this woman were human, just like him. They were killers, just like him. But they were nothing like him, nor he anything like them. To reduce violence to an evil unto itself, without regard to the circumstances that spawned it, was a philosophical arrogance McCarter could not stomach.

Securing his grip on the butt of his pistol, he walked over to the edge of the animal pen between the two houses and looked out into the narrow street. The incessant rain dimpled the puddles with the weight of its falling drops. He opened a little gate and stepped out into the street, leaving it open behind him.

He crouched, turned and made eye contact with James, who nodded. As his Phoenix Force colleagues shuffled forward behind him he hunted the darkness for unfamiliar shapes. The team had stumbled onto the middle of something, he knew, and he needed to get a handle on it and fast.

Once Phoenix Force was in position he began to move toward the compound, walking quickly with his weapon ready. He reached the edge of a round, one-story silo and looked carefully around it. A short passageway between buildings linked the main street with the secondary alley McCarter now navigated.

About twenty yards down a man stood with his back to McCarter. The ex–SAS commando narrowed his eyes in suspicion. The man wasn’t dressed like a rough mountain tribesman. He wore a night suit bristling with all the paraphernalia and accoutrements of the modern special-operations soldier. For some reason only night-vision goggles were missing.

McCarter lifted his carbine in a slow, smooth gesture. He straightened his arm and placed the sights squarely on the occipital lobe of the terrorist soldier’s skull. His finger curled around the trigger of the carbine and took up the slack.

The combatant looked to his left and lifted a fist above his head in some prearranged signal. McCarter shuffled sideways across the narrow mouth of the alley, his weapon tracking the man’s back with every step as he moved.

Once on the other side of the alleyway, McCarter slid around a corner and put his back against the wall and turned his face back toward the dirt lane he had just crossed. He drew the Beretta 92-F in an even, deliberate motion. He held the pistol up so that the muzzle was poised beside the hard plane of his cheek bone. He bent slightly at the knee and crouched before risking a glance around the edge of the building.

He looked over to where James was crouched motionless behind cover. He put a finger to his lips in a pantomime for quiet then pointed at his own eyes and at the European operative. James nodded once.

McCarter prepared for his kill.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Dominican Republic

The sawmill squatted on the banks of the Ozama River. Silent as a mausoleum, the building stood surrounded by warehouses and industrial structures now fallen dark, or burned to rubble in the wake of successive riots and civil unrest. Rain fell, dirty gray from the sky.

Rosario Blancanales drew his mouth into a tight line. He scanned the building and the area around it through his night-vision goggles, searching for telltale smeary silhouettes in the monochromatic green of the high-tech device. He saw nothing. The sounds of traffic came to him from the other areas of the city, muted across the distance. Close by, his ears detected only the whisper of cold wind skipping across the polluted river.

Outfitted from the cache at the safehouse, Able Team had arrived at the meeting set up by the missing FBI agent.

Next to the Puerto Rican Special Forces veteran, Lyons scrutinized the building, determining his approach. To the rear of the building loading docks with big roll-up bay doors sat shut and locked.

On the side of the building closest to him stood a maintenance door set on a short flight of concrete steps. Off in the distance, Lyons heard the soft thump-thump of a relief agency helicopter cruising low over the city.

Lyons again scanned the area through his goggles.

Santo Domingo was a city locked down under martial law, threatened by civil unrest and criminal gangs threatening to overrun their squalid ghettos. Police units patrolled in armored personnel carriers, and army checkpoints secured every major road and highway leading into the city.

Able Team had taken a grave risk by going armed into the streets of a supposedly allied nation dealing with the threat of a violent insurrection. An insurrection with increasingly apparent ties to the worldwide narcotics syndicates. Moving incognito had proved nearly impossible.

Lyons moved forward, scrambling out of the empty drainage ditch running parallel to the abandoned sawmill’s main building. He approached a chain-link fence and dropped down, removing wire cutters from his combat harness. With deft, practiced movements Lyons snipped an opening and bent back one edge.

Blancanales held the wire up while Schwarz remained outside the building to provide security and surveillance.

Lyons slid through head first and popped up on the other side. Blancanales crawled through and they began their approach. Traveling in a wide crescent designed to take them as far as possible from the silent street, Lyons approached the single maintenance entrance on the building’s side. He scanned the triple row of windows set above the building’s ground floor for any sign of movement. As he neared the building Lyons pulled a Glock 17 from his shoulder rig. The weapon had come from the safehouse armory but was not his first choice in handguns.

Lyons crab-walked up the short flight of concrete stairs leading to the door, clicking the selector switch off safety on his pistol as he moved. Behind him Blancanales tracked the muzzle of his own pistol through zones of fire.

Reaching the door, Lyons pulled a lock-pick gun from a cargo pocket and slid it expertly home into the lock as Blancanales maintained security.

The ex–LAPD detective squeezed the trigger on the lock device and heard the bolt securing the door snap back. Replacing the lock-pick gun, Lyons put a hand on the door, holding his 9 mm pistol up and ready. He looked over at Blancanales, who nodded wordlessly.