Extreme Arsenal

Hawkins saluted the Canadian with an index finger touch to his brow. “Yes, sir.”

AGENT SAM GUTHRIE looked at his desk clock and saw that his noon appointment with the four Justice Department agents was only minutes away. He closed the top button of his shirt, readjusted his tie and made sure his shirt was tucked into his suit pants. Being a tall, slim man, it was hard to find clothes that fit him so that he matched the image of a neat, suave spy. At least the short bristle of his graying blond hair was hard to mess. He turned off his computer and stepped out of his office.

“Want anything from the commissary on my way back, Xian?” Guthrie asked his secretary.

Xian, a pretty Vietnamese-American woman, gave him a warm smile. “No thanks. My roommate Dawn packed some quesadillas for me and I picked up some pop on the way in.”

“All right. I’ll catch you later,” Guthrie said, and left for the meeting, which was being held outside in a courtyard. The small park was ringed with white-noise generators concealed under bushes to prevent eavesdropping. It was also in sight of several low-profile guard emplacements, with Marine sharpshooters on duty. It may have seemed paranoid, but Guthrie knew from recent history that even Langley wasn’t immune to attack.

The four “Justice Department” agents looked like a motley crew to Guthrie—a tall, slender black man, a barrel-chested Caucasian, a stocky, swarthy Hispanic, and a lean, but average-looking Caucasian.

“I’m Roy. That’s Rey, Farrow and Presley,” Manning stated. “Hal Brognola arranged this interview.”

“Right. Something about an old acquaintance of mine,” Guthrie replied. “It wouldn’t be Roberto DaCosta, would it?”

Manning nodded. “What have you heard?”

“That he was murdered last night,” Guthrie replied. “I used to work with him down in El Salvador.”

“Doing what?” Encizo asked as Guthrie directed them to a granite table with matching semi-circular benches.

“We were investigating ORDEN and the ESA, the governing body of El Salvador and their pet killers, back in the eighties,” Guthrie replied. “Roberto was an asset within the organization, and he kept us up to date on ORDEN’s less than legal operations.”

“Death squads,” James challenged.

“Among other things,” Guthrie responded. “Even back then, we weren’t too excited to be associated with professional murderers. Once the Sandinistas murdered an American missionary in Nicaragua, and it appeared as a full-page spread in Newsweek, we became a lot more gun shy about who we worked with.”

Guthrie shook his head at the thought. “Roberto wanted out desperately, and I arranged for his relocation to London after ORDEN collapsed. Even though someone went to town exterminating the death squads that made up the ESA, it really wasn’t safe for him in-country anymore.”

Encizo nodded at the answer. He remembered Able Team’s wars with Fascist International, the primary supplier of right-wing death squads to Central and South America. Though he’d only been involved in one operation against the Reich of the Americas, he kept up with after-action reports and knew that when Able put Fascist International in its collective grave, the world became a better place to live. He ruminated for a moment on how much of a link there might be between a revived FI and the assassination of DaCosta.

“Did DaCosta keep close tabs on things back home?” Hawkins inquired.

Guthrie shrugged. “I tried to limit my contact with him. I didn’t want to compromise his new location.”

“You still refer to him as Roberto, though,” James stated. “He was more than just an asset.”

Guthrie frowned. “You picked up on that.”

“We’ve been around a few times,” Manning said. “What did you hear?”

“His nephew is on the run from something,” Guthrie replied.

“What happened?” Hawkins asked.

Guthrie shook his head. “I don’t know. That much didn’t get back to me, but I started trying to find him through my own resources…”

The throb of a helicopter cut through the air and caught the attention of the assembled men.

“Classic Stony Man Tourist Luck,” Hawkins muttered loud enough for James to hear over the approaching aircraft before the hiss of rockets split the air. Rooftop targets spit up geysers of flame, and Hawkins realized that the helicopter had just destroyed the heavy antiaircraft emplacements nestled atop the office buildings.

The ex-Ranger would have laughed if he hadn’t seen the weapons pods bristling like stubby wings on the sides of the helicopter. Instead, he dived across the marble table and threw Guthrie to the ground.

From the towers, Marine marksmen opened fire, but their rifle bullets only sparked ineffectually off the hull of the sleek gunship overhead.

A line of machine-gun fire chopped across the courtyard and a .50-caliber slug smashed a crater in the center of the marble table that Phoenix Force had been sitting at.

Manning dumped the magazine out of the butt of his Desert Eagle and stuffed in a clip of 180-grain, keg-shaped hunting loads. It wouldn’t be much more effective than the rifles the Marines had in the towers, but the combat rounds he had loaded previously would flatten like spit balls against an armored aircraft. Encizo unleathered his Heckler & Koch USP and pumped out a half dozen 9 mm Parabellum rounds before he ducked behind his heavy stone bench.

A rocket lanced from the wing pod and blew a Marine sentry in his perch to oblivion. Another two helicopters popped out over the main computer center, but unlike the slender-tailed, bulb-headed dragonfly that swept death and destruction over the Langley compound, these were ugly, reptilian sharks, disgorging rappelling lines and black, armor-clad killers.

“Look familiar?” James asked Guthrie.

“Nope,” the CIA agent replied as they got to their feet. James pushed Guthrie toward the shelter of another marble table as the deadly bug-shaped gunship pivoted and spotted them.

Manning fired two shots from his Desert Eagle, aiming the accurate weapon at the barrel-like rocket pod hanging off the side of the helicopter. The 180-grain keg-shaped slugs hit the drum-size target, but one round sparked wildly off the rocket launcher and ricocheted into the main body of the gunship. The second bullet punched through the thin, precut sheet-metal cover of the artillery rocket pod and glanced off the top of the tube. A fearsome jet of flame erupted from the front of the pod as the explosive dart was detonated by a .357 Magnum penetrator. The gunship rocked, but the pod was well-designed, containing and funneling the explosion into a thrust of superheated gas and shrapnel that peppered the windows of a building.

Explosive bolts fired and the heavy, drumlike canister tumbled off the stub-wing and sailed toward the ground. Hawkins had taken cover behind a tree, and was drilling 9 mm slugs at the bottom of the helicopter. His rounds had little effect, and he leaped wildly as the rocket pod smashed through the branches of the tree and cracked the concrete where he’d been crouched instants before.

Hawkins whirled and looked at the pod. A red light began flashing rapidly on its top, and the Phoenix Force warrior knew that the electronic box wasn’t going to be healthy for anyone in the courtyard if it reached its peak. He aimed his stubby little Glock 26 and hammered out the remnants of its magazine into the black transmitter. The metallic box crumpled and shattered, sparks flying as battery capacitors discharged. Hawkins took a deep breath as he realized that being close enough to recognize the remote detonator for what it was, was also near enough to ground zero to be vaporized by the self-destructing rocket pod.

He shook off the thought of being that close to death and fumbled a 12-round magazine into the butt of the tiny Glock, his hands trembling with the aftershocks of an adrenaline rush that slipped him into overdrive. Hawkins took cover behind a tree beside the inert rocket pod and took three quick breaths to get his thundering heartbeat back under control. A burst of .50-caliber slugs tore through the dirt and punched into the tree trunk, spraying Hawkins’s hair with splinters.

Rafael Encizo rushed toward the entrance of the building where the black-armored commandos disgorged onto the roof. A quick glance told the stocky Cuban that this was the computer center at Langley. He hit the doors with his shoulder and bounced off the glass. Electronic locks had shut down the building, and he knew that he couldn’t shoot through the clear doors. CIA Headquarters was protected by armored glass that was resistant to even rifle rounds.

The Cuban turned and saw the gunship swivel. He decided to play chicken with the aircraft. It would be a one in a million chance, but the Computer Center was under assault by mysterious invaders, and the CIA would need all the help it could get from the members of one of America’s finest fighting forces. The Cuban pro fired off three quick shots at the silhouette of the pilot behind his armored cockpit dome. Even the high-potency 9 mm NATO ball ammo bounced off the heavy curved Plexiglas, but it drew the ire of the gunship’s jockey.

The heavy M-2 machine-gun pods suddenly erupted with fire and Encizo threw himself behind the heavy granite cylinder that provided both decoration for the courtyard and antiramming and car-bombing protection for the Computer Center building. Four feet in diameter, the heavy stone block stopped the first salvo of 750-grain, half-inch slugs from the deadly gunship, even though each impact created a four-inch deep crater in the face of the pedestal. Encizo rolled to one side as the helicopter swiveled and tried to get a new line of fire on him. Behind him, the armored glass doors detonated into a rain of cracked shards as armor-piercing .50-caliber bullets smashed through them. The power of the big fifties had served Encizo in opening up the Computer Center, though he was pinned down now.

It wasn’t hopeless, however. Three other members of Phoenix Force were in action in the courtyard.

Calvin James and Gary Manning exchanged a quick glance, and the black ex-SEAL and the burly Canadian leveled their .357 Magnum sidearms at the tail boom of the gunship. James’s short-barreled Colt Python wasn’t designed for long-range shooting, but across the forty yards to the NOTAR tail boom of the gunship, it was plenty accurate and powerful. Manning’s massive Desert Eagle had proved itself capable of hitting targets five times that distant. Heavy-duty penetrating slugs from both mighty Magnum weapons hammered into the tail boom. James’s 158-grain lead slugs and Manning’s 180-grain hunting rounds struck the air vanes that directed forced thrust to stabilize the helicopter in flight. The NOTAR was protected from ground fire, its vulnerable tail rotor replaced by a powerful fan housed in a cylinder of armored metal. However, the directing vanes needed to be exposed to allow the helicopter to turn in one direction or the other.

The .357 Magnum maelstrom directed at the tail boom vents smashed the louvers out of place, wrecking them on their pivoting mechanisms. The gunship jerked as the pilot fought to keep the aircraft straight.

“T.J.! Go with Rafe!” Manning bellowed.

The Southerner nodded and broke for the Computer Center as the Cuban raced into the now-excavated entrance.

James rushed across the courtyard as the helicopter and gunner fought to keep the gunship in the air. He skidded to Manning’s side behind another marble table. “Any plans to deal with the chopper?”

“It’s moving too erratically for us to target any more vulnerable points,” Manning answered. The big Canadian’s eyes narrowed as he watched the aircraft dip, then swerve. The machine guns ripped wildly, blowing out windows in another building. “Still, if it keeps shooting, it’ll kill people in the buildings, even without aiming.”

James popped the cylinder on his Colt Python and thumbed two fresh rounds into the revolver. “I wish I’d brought a rifle or a grenade launcher…”

Manning looked over to the jettisoned pod, then back to James. “How about a rocket launcher?”

James grinned. “How’re we going to set it off?”