Sky Sentinels

The Americans continued eating as the men with the red scarves around their necks made their way down the embankment to the water. But they all stopped in mid-bite when the Pasdarans sloshed straight across the water and began climbing the bank on the Iraqi side.

Patrick looked quickly to the side and saw that the breeze still held the noncombatant flag straight out. There was no way the Iranians could miss it. And there was no doubting that they knew they were invading another country.

“What the hell are they up to?” Court Hough said in a shaky voice. “Don’t they know where the border is?”

“They know,” Davis said as he continued clicking away with his camera. “They just don’t care.” His eyebrows furrowed. “I don’t like this. No, I don’t like this at all.”

As the squad of Iranians continued to make its way up the hill, one of the newsmen stood. “Look,” he called out in a loud voice as he turned slightly and lifted his arm, tapping the media patch on his shoulder with the fingers of his other hand. “We’re newsmen.”

As he turned and pointed toward the flag Davis had jammed into the ground, one of the lead Pasdarans raised his AK-47 and shot him through the heart. The newsman fell down the bank, past the oncoming Iranians and finally came to rest in the stream, turning the water a dull red as the blood drained from his body.

All the rest of the Americans froze in place. A few seconds later they were completely surrounded.

“Stand up!” an Iranian with sergeant’s stripes ordered as he jammed the muzzle of his M-16 into Patrick’s chest. The Americans complied. Turning to his side, the sergeant rattled off orders in Farsi and a second later four men hurried forward, searching the Americans head to foot and confiscating their equipment and bags.

One of the Pasdarans suddenly turned toward the sergeant and spoke rapidly, holding up a North American Arms .22 Magnum Black Widow he had found. The sergeant stepped away from Patrick and walked toward the two men. Holding out his hand, he took the tiny hideout gun and lifted it to his eyes. “What is this?” he demanded in perfect English. “A toy?”

The American newsman saw a possible opening and took it. “Yes,” he said emphatically. “Just a toy gun. I found it and planned to take it home to my kids to play with.” As soon as the sentence was finished he held his breath.

“I see,” said the sergeant. “So, if it is a toy, this should not hurt.” Pressing the barrel of the little pistol between his captive’s eyes, he cocked the hammer and pulled the trigger.

The .22 Magnum round exploded in the newsman’s brain, sending blood, flesh and chips of skull out both the front and back of his head.

The sergeant turned toward the rest of them. “It seems it is a dangerous toy,” he said, smiling. “It should come with a warning on the box.”

The air filled with laughter.

But it was all Iranian.

The sergeant barked out more orders, and the soldiers who had searched the American newsmen gathered up both the still and video cameras. But instead of taking them as Patrick expected them to, they piled the cameras into the arms of one of the FOX correspondents.

The sergeant looked the man in the eyes. “Take your tape, and your pictures, back to your President,” he said. “Tell him that if he can invade other countries, so can Iran.” Then he aimed the .22 Magnum at the FOX man’s foot, cocked the hammer and pulled the trigger again.

The American’s howl of pain was almost as loud as the explosion.

“That will slow you down a little,” the sergeant said. “But you can still make it back.”

The FOX man had dropped the camera bags and now more Pasdarans lifted the bags and slung them over his shoulders again.

“I think I will keep this toy for myself,” the sergeant said, grinning. More orders in Farsi followed, and suddenly Patrick and Davis found their hands cuffed behind their backs.

“Congratulations,” the sergeant said. “You have the honor of becoming our guests.” He turned one last time to the FOX man who was sweating and trying to stand on one leg, his face contorted in agony. “Go now,” he said. “And tell your president that this is only the beginning.”

A moment later Wilson Patrick, Buford Davis and the remaining three men from FOX were trying not to fall as they were escorted down the embankment toward the stream.

Patrick glanced over his shoulder to see the FOX man begin limping back toward the American base camp.

He wished he had paid more attention to the man’s name.

CHAPTER ONE

The three members of Able Team wore skintight black combat suits as they fell through the sky over Oklahoma City’s south side. Below, Carl Lyons watched the traffic on Interstate 44 as he prepared to pull the ripcord on his parachute.

Local law enforcement had already set up roadblocks surrounding the strike zone. There were already hundreds of law-enforcement officials on the scene. But they had been ordered by the President himself to wait for Carl “Ironman” Lyons, Rosario “Politician” Blancanales and Herman “Gadgets” Schwarz, the three men who made up Stony Man Farm’s crack Stateside counterterrorist squad known as Able Team.

At the last possible second, Lyons jerked his cord and looked up to watch the parachute canopy open above his head. A few feet to the side and a mere foot or two above the canopy, he watched Blancanales and Schwarz do the same.

The three men’s black combat boots all hit the asphalt parking lot of a deserted Pizza Hut in front of the large church at almost the same time. Wasting no time, they cut the lines to their chutes and let them blow away in the strong Oklahoma wind.

Somebody else could pick them up. Right now, Lyons, Blancanales and Schwarz all had more important duties to perform than to worry about littering.

Lyons glanced at a cardboard sign in the otherwise empty window of the Pizza Hut building. It read Future Home Of The Southern Hills Baptist Church Youth Group. He wondered just how many of those young Christian boys and girls would still be alive once the building had been remodeled. Unless he and his team were successful, the purchase of the former Pizza Hut might turn out to have been a bad investment for the church.

Terrorists dressed in khaki uniforms had taken over the sanctuary at approximately ten-fifteen that morning, just as the musical portion of the service was ending and the sermon was about to begin. Some had moved in through the sixteen entrances to the sanctuary with submachine guns and smoke and stun grenades, while others had taken over the balcony and rounded up miscellaneous personnel from the offices and other rooms inside the church. At least one man—an off-duty police officer—had been killed during the siege. The small .38 Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special in the pocket of his sport coat had proved to be no match for the superior fire- and manpower of the invaders.

As Lyons straightened, a burly man with sandy-brown hair, a well-trimmed mustache and wearing a brown suit walked up to him. “I’m Langford,” he said simply. “You must be the guy they called me about?—Agent Lyons.”

Lyons let the M-16 fall to the end of the sling over his shoulder and shook the man’s hand. From the briefing Able Team had held via cell phone as they flew to Oklahoma City he knew that Langford was the director of the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation.

“Give me a quick rundown on the situation, will you?” Lyons asked.

“Not a lot to tell you that you didn’t hear during the flight,” Langford said. “We’ve had some sparse communication with the men inside. We’re estimating that there’s about three dozen, total.”

“Any other Feds shown up yet?” Lyons watched the OSBI man’s eyes carefully as he spoke. As a former LAPD police officer himself before joining the Stony Man crew, he was more than familiar with the turf wars between law-enforcement agencies. No one liked having what they thought was his responsibility taken away from him. But he saw no jealousy on Langford’s face as he questioned him.

“Just the OKC office of the FBI,” Langford said. He looked toward a group of men in carefully tailored suits who stood huddled around a minivan. “They got their little feelings hurt when I wouldn’t let them take over the show.” He paused to draw in a breath. “I think they’re arguing about what dry cleaner is the best at stuffing their shirts right now.”

Lyons wasn’t known for joviality, but that one made him smile. “They’re good at that,” he said. Then, changing the subject, he said, “Have the men inside ID’d themselves or given out any demands?”

“No demands yet,” Langford said. “It’s almost like they’re waiting for us to get set up on purpose in order to make the biggest splash possible.”

“That’s a legitimate possibility,” Lyons said, nodding. “Any idea who they are? The briefing we got on the plane said they were all dark-skinned, wearing khakis and shouting what sounded like Arabic to a kid who got away.”

Langford nodded. “We had a brief conversation with the boy. They didn’t claim to be a terrorist group at all. They said they were Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Sounds like a load of crap to me.”

“Me, too,” Lyons said. “The Iranian government openly sponsoring a terrorist attack on a Christian church inside the U.S.? That’s like declaring war.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Langford said. “But they could be Iranian rather than Arabic. Most people around here wouldn’t know the difference between Arabic and Farsi if they heard it side-by-side.”

Schwarz and Blancanales had so far remained silent. Schwarz looked at Langford, “You have any idea where they are inside the church?”

“That kid that sneaked out right at the beginning,” Langford said. “He’d been in the bathroom when the shooting started and the grenades went off, and he ran for the closest exit. He said it looked like they were taking everyone into the sanctuary.”

Lyons felt his jaw tighten as he nodded his understanding. That meant explosives. If the terrorists were armed only with firearms, they’d have spread the hostages out throughout the building. The Able Team leader was about to speak again when a dark red Toyota Tundra pickup pulled up, followed by two black-and-white OCPD cars, sirens blaring and lights flashing. It had obviously run one of the roadblocks.

A man wearing a large turquoise bolo tie, a gray suit, black cowboy boots and a white straw fedora stepped out of the truck while a woman Lyons assumed was his wife stayed inside.

Officers from the two squad cars leaped out after him, guns drawn. Ignoring them and the other officers stationed around the church, the man in the bolo walked toward Langford and Lyons.