Unified Action

Before he moved, Lyons took a final scan of his surroundings. The industrial wasteland was eerily still. Taking a breath, he turned the handle and pulled open the door.

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

BARBARA PRICE CRADLED her phone next to her ear and took the clipboard and pen from the Farm’s head of security, a former Marine, Buck Greene. On the other end of the com link Hal Brognola queried Price further.

“There has to be more than that, Barb,” he said.

“I know, Hal,” she said into the phone. Signing the requisition form, she nodded once to Greene and handed the clipboard back. “We don’t have any other connection besides the fact that the two men were brothers. No other link. Just seems strange.”

“All right,” Brognola relented. “I’ll call the director and see if anything about the man’s brother came forward during the agent’s security background checks.”

“Great,” Price said. “When you get it, just shoot it to Delahunt on her email. We’ll feed it into Wethers’s search from there. I was thinking that for the brother to get his job as a civilian contractor flying those drones he had to have been in the military, right? Air Force or Army.”

Seeing where she was going, Brognola grunted his agreement. “Right. I’ll check to see if the other brother had some military time before joining the FBI. But how are we doing with commo for Phoenix Force?”

“We’re almost positive it’s a high-end electronics jammer, but whose, we can’t say yet. Bear’s working on trying to get a relay station from Bagram he can para-drop in to try to outboost the hostile signal.” Price paused. “No promises, though.”

“Fine. Keep me up to date and I’ll try to shake something loose on these two brothers for you.”

“Thanks, Hal,” she said, and hung up.

Price looked down at the cell in her hand and frowned. Both Phoenix Force and Able Team had been scrambled at the last minute on these operations, a situation ripe for intervention by that bastard Murphy and his immutable law. There had been no time for advance homework or advance preparations, and she prayed to heaven it wasn’t going to cost her the lives of her men in the field.

Dominican Republic

LYONS STEPPED THROUGH the black mouth of the open door and into the darkened interior of the building. He shuffled smoothly to one side and sank into a tight crouch, pistol up. Blancanales stepped through and let the door swing shut behind him. Lyons quickly scanned the hall in both directions. It was empty. Rising, he began moving down the corridor toward the rear of the building. Covering their rear, Blancanales followed.

The sawmill was oppressively still and quiet around them. The perimeter hallway ran the length of the structure, with doors leading to the building’s interior spaced at intervals along the inside wall. At the far end of the hallway Lyons could make out the heavy steel of a fire door that would open up onto stairs.

The intelligence of the building layout had been spotty. Aaron Kurtzman had been unable to pull up engineer blueprints during his rushed info search. All Lyons knew was that according to Smith’s contact the FBI agent was supposed to tag along with a minor street crook and the man’s bodyguards to a meet in an office suite on the second floor.

The sound of his breath loud in his own ears, Lyons entered the stairwell. He craned his neck, looking upward. Nothing moved on the stairs or crouched in the gloomy landings. He tracked his scanning vision with the muzzle of the Glock 17. The hair on the back of Lyons’s neck stood up like the hackles of a dog.

Blancanales put his shoulder at a right angle to the big ex-cop’s back, his own weapon up.

There was a smell of dust and disuse hanging heavy in the air. Faintly beneath that was the slight odor of machine oil coming up from the sawmill floor. Lyons’s straining ears detected only the beating of his own heart. He placed the reinforced soles of his boots carefully on the first metal rung of the building’s skeletal framed staircase and began to climb.

He edged around the curve of the stair, Blancanales right behind him. The raised grip of the pistol’s butt tight in his palm, he kept his Weaver stance tight, ready to react to the slightest motion. Smith’s contact was an established veteran of life as a hunted man. Security this apparently lax was inexplicable in such a man.

Reaching the second-floor landing, Lyons snuggled up tight against the fire door on that level as Blancanales took a position. He pressed his back against wall beside the door handle. The seal of the landing door was too tight for him to use a fiber optics surveillance cable bore scope. The heavy steel door effectively muted any potential sound coming from the second-floor hallway.

Gritting his teeth, Lyons nodded once and Blancanales pulled open the door. The ex-cop darted his head around the edge. He was met with silence and darkness. The hallway ran for several yards, office doors on one side, dark windows facing the parking lot on the other. The hall turned in a L-break at the far end toward the front of the building.

Lyons moved down the center of the hallway, ready to drop prone or respond with deadly fire at the slightest threat. Behind him Blancanales edged into the hallway, weapon up.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Kyrgyzstan

In the street a second black-clad European had joined his partner. This one held an ancient AKS submachine gun and together the two men jogged quickly up the alley toward McCarter’s position. McCarter ducked his head back around the edge of the building. He skipped several steps to the side and slid into the recessed arch of a doorway. The two combatants had now cut McCarter off from the rest of Phoenix Force.

As the men rounded the corner he could hear them talking to one another in low, excited voices. Both of them turned down the alley in the direction of the IMU compound and McCarter’s hiding spot.

McCarter stepped out of the doorway and into the rain and leveled his Beretta 92-F as the men stumbled up against each other in surprise at his sudden appearance. The pistol spit a single time even as McCarter extended his arm, and the terrorist holding the AKS went down. The rain had plastered the gunman’s shirt to his muscular frame, and McCarter could clearly see where the blunt round smashed into the prominent ridge of the man’s sternum and punched through it.

The terrorist fighter tripped over backward under the impact, going down. He dropped his submachine gun and it fell across his legs as he went down. Beside him the second SKS-armed terrorist struggled to bring his longer weapon to bear as McCarter swiveled at the hips and brought the Beretta around at point-blank range.