Seismic Surge

As Lyons, Schwarz and Blancanales reached their cover, the three partners made a quick visual verification that the team was whole and unharmed.

“No hits?” Lyons asked.

“Nope,” Blancanales returned. Schwarz simply grunted agreement.

“Not even on the body armor, not that we’d have been able to handle it. Those are five-five-six they’re pumping out,” Schwarz added. “They missed, but now they know how quick we are.”

“So we go sneaky,” Lyons returned, unleathering the machine pistol stored in a shoulder holster under his windbreaker. Long ago, Able Team had learned the benefits of carrying fully automatic handguns with folding foregrips for better control and utility. In the early days, these had been Beretta 93-R machine pistols. Now they opted for the Heckler and Koch MP-7. The bonus of the compact machine pistol was the fact that it not only had a vertical foregrip that could be folded to fit in a shoulder holster, but it also had an extendable stock to give it riflelike stability. Lyons wasn’t much of a fan of the MP-7’s 4.6 mm projectiles, but they moved at a blistering, Kevlar-defeating velocity and were still bigger than the rounds of a Heckler and Koch G-11 autorifle, which was much larger and bulkier

The three Stony Man warriors snapped out the collapsing shoulder stocks, folding down the forward grips. The folding iron sights were propped into place so that they resembled the precision sights of the M-4s and M-16s they normally utilized. As they did so, the team shifted among the wreckage of the arson-gutted boatyard, seeking better cover and concealment, even as enemy rifles crackled, trying to pin them down.

“These bastards are getting on my nerves,” Blancanales snarled as a spray of debris splashed against him from the impact of a dozen 5.56 mm rounds. “Especially since this seems like amateur hour.”

Lyons and Schwarz heard their partner over the hands-free communicators that they wore. Lyons spoke into his throat mike. “Confirm...low training?”

“I’m still here, and I’ve given them two clean shots at me,” Blancanales replied. “Do the math.”

“No fair, Pol,” Schwarz interrupted. “Ironman can barely do math in a classroom, let alone when he’s getting shot at.”

Lyons flipped off Schwarz. “All right. New plan.”

“Fall back and kill?” Blancanales asked over the headset.

“No. Just cover me,” Lyons said. He handed his machine pistol over to Schwarz.

“Bluejay,” Schwarz muttered.

Lyons pulled out one of his handguns, a Smith and Wesson .45, and held it between his thumb and forefinger. “Stop! Stop shooting!”

His voice was shrill, terrified. It was a completely alien sound compared to all that the other two members of Able Team had heard before, but this was completely new to the men trying to shoot at them.

“I’m just an accountant! Stop shooting!”

“Throw your gun out!” one of the shooters shouted in response.

“Paper jockey!” Schwarz snarled out loud. He waylaid his MP-7 and fired his pistol, intentionally missing Lyons, but that elicited a wave of precision covering fire immediately.

Lyons tossed the Smith and Wesson on the ground, without a care, just like an inept desk worker would. He stumbled out into the open, arms wavering in the air, his eyes cast downward.

The Bluejay ploy was a simple one. One member of the team would feign injury or incompetence to call the attention of the enemy away from the others. So far, the three of them were aware that their opponents were only pretending incompetence on their own. Lyons’s use of himself as bait had not drawn enemy fire because they had some other agenda. When the prisoner that offered himself had come under fire from Schwarz, their precision shot up to deadly levels of effect.

Whoever these conspirators were, they were sharp and alert, but they were also curious about the trio of men who stumbled around the boatyard in Norfolk. That meant that they wanted and needed answers. If Lyons could get close, he might have a chance to take one while they were still in prisoner-acquisition mode.

And if not, well, Lyons still had his Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum in its shoulder holster. Lyons was an old-school LAPD officer, and his side arm had been a grandfathered revolver, either a Colt Python or its Smith and Wesson counterpart. Sure, the Colt 1911 had a lighter trigger and a faster reload, and it sat flatter beneath his concealment garments, but Lyons had a trigger finger that was trained for fast and deadly double-action revolver shooting. This wasn’t just any .357 Magnum, either, it was a Military and Police R8. It not only had the unusual five-inch, Picatinny-railed barrel, but it also was fed from an eight-round cylinder—matching the capacity of a 1911, but not the .45 auto he’d discarded, and was rendered portable by an alloy frame.

Recoil in rapid-fire with his preferred 125-grain jacketed hollowpoints was quite easy, thanks to a set of rubber finger-grooved grips and “enough” mass. Lyons could draw and fire the R8, a name referring to its being an 8-shot revolver, and put all eight hits inside of a playing card at fifteen feet, or hit four different targets twice in the space of five seconds.

It still wouldn’t help much if he were directly under the gun, but Able’s version of the Bluejay ploy counted on a full team effort.

Right now, Lyons could tell that there were three sets of sights on him directly, but judging by the hail of fire that started this off, the rest were pretty well out of his line of sight, at least since his hands were up.

Fortunately for him, he had two highly trained combat veterans on his side, and thanks to his earpiece, he was picking up the pings from their laser “painters,” which gave him a relative range and position for each of the enemy crew.

There were nine of them, three for each team member, at least those who were in sight. Lyons figured on at least two more drivers, plus security guns for their vehicles. His best guess put thirteen against them. It wasn’t the worst that Able Team had faced, but if this death squad was worth its salt, Lyons was in for one hell of a fight and he was going to start it standing out in the open.

“Who the hell are you?” the commando who had addressed him previously snarled.

Lyons kept his hands up at the level of his ears, his face wrinkled and masked in fear. He could only imagine the ribbing that he would receive later from his partners about his acting. That didn’t matter. Lyons simply had to confuse the enemy for a few more moments, not win an award for best actor.

“I’m just an accountant, I told you that already! Please just let me go.”

In the open, Lyons could better make out the uniforms of the gunmen and the gear they were packing. The man who was talking to him wore a dull, nonreflective helmet with bullet-resistant wraparound goggles. So clad, he was relatively safe from a head shot. The rifleman’s torso and shoulders were no less vulnerable, polycarbide shells shielding his shoulder joints and the heavy load-bearing vest betraying its built-in trauma plates. Whoever had sent these men to ensure that the Norfolk boatyard’s secrets remain buried beneath ash and submerged in the cold waters of the harbor was not taking any chances by sending the killers in with secondhand weapons and armor.

Blancanales’s voice hissed through the earpiece of Lyons’s hands-free communicator. “All right, Ironman, we’ve got the measure of these assholes. It’s all up to you. Give us the signal and we mop these idiots off the deck.”

Lyons simply nodded, maintaining his facade of fear. Thanks to the observations of Schwarz and Blancanales, he had a good idea of where the enemy had set themselves up. Right now he knew that there were two killers just out of his line of sight but in position to pop up and riddle him with bullets. However, since they had been sighted by his partners, they were far less of a threat simply because either Blancanales or Schwarz already had them targeted. The hidden gunmen were only a secondary threat compared to the grim, armored figure who was already addressing him.

This was going to have to be done the old-fashioned way. “My arms are getting tired, can I put them down please?” Lyons whimpered as he spoke.

“I don’t want any funny business from you, motherfucker,” the cleanup crew killer snarled in warning. He didn’t lower the muzzle of his rifle, a SIG 556 folding-stock assault rifle. Lyons knew that his body armor couldn’t take a point-blank volley from the killer; Kevlar might just as well have been gossamer for all the good it would do him. “Leave your damn mitts in the air.”

Lyons noticed a jutting steel I-beam that had the mass and durability to deflect the storm of rifle fire, and it was just within a few yards of his position. Just to be certain, Lyons mentally measured the distance once more, and then with an explosion of power he leaped into the shadow of the I-beam. Even as he dived for cover he clawed the N-frame .357 Magnum from its hidden holster. The enemy commando opened up with his SIG, but Lyons was no longer where the muzzle of the weapon was pointing as he pulled the trigger. A swarm of buzzing hornets whipped through the air, close enough that one of the bullets plucked at the sleeve of his windbreaker. Regardless of how close the enemy’s fire had come to ending his life, Lyons was shielded and down once again.

From his right, Schwarz and his MP-7 entered the fight, the little machine pistol’s 4.6 mm bullets zipping to catch one of the ambushers in the back of his head. The gunman’s helmet deflected much of the glancing burst, but the single projectile hit dead-on, its reinforced point punching through the Kevlar helmet and into the skull of the would-be murderer. An explosion of skull fragments, glass and spongy dollops of brain matter sprayed to the air close enough to Lyons that it peppered the left shoulder of his windbreaker.

Lyons didn’t mind brain stains on the Department of Justice windbreaker. He was far more concerned with the rifleman who was trying to burn him out of cover with extended bursts from an assault rifle. Lyons must have annoyed the killer because he had abandoned fire discipline and was shooting without regard for how much ammo he had in the weapon. In only a few seconds the sniper would run out, and once there was a lull in the firing, Lyons was poised to make his move.

The enemy rifle went silent and Lyons could hear a muffled curse coming from the angry commando. Too late the shooter realized his error and was torn between fumbling a new magazine into the weapon and ducking behind cover himself. That pause allowed Lyons the time he needed to whip around the I-beam, center the front sight of his Magnum on his enemy’s goggles and milk the trigger of the revolver. Punching out of the barrel at over 1500 feet per second, Lyons’s shot smashed into the tough ballistic glass of the killer’s eyewear, breaking through it and crushing the forehead beneath.

From Lyons’s left, Blancanales had already entered the battle with a quieter opening gambit. The wily old Able Team warrior had fast-balled a fragmentation grenade hard enough at the head of the third assailant that it popped straight up into the air over the dazed gunman. As the handheld bomb reached the apex of its bounce, it exploded. A sheet of fire and shrapnel rained down, scything into the helmet and shoulder armor of the man. Heavily protected, the gunner was unharmed by the fragments thrown off by the grenade, but the pressure wave struck him like a baseball bat and even the protection of his helmet couldn’t keep him from staggering dazedly into the open.

Blancanales hated that he had to be so ruthless toward the stunned foe, but the armored assassin still had a firm grip on his weapon and would recover his senses within a few moments. Taking aim, Blancanales opened fire and peppered the gunman’s chest with a full-auto salvo. While the action was tactically sound, despite its ruthlessness, Blancanales was not being unnecessarily cruel. He was simply stopping a would-be killer from continuing to target federal investigators.

Just because Able Team was undercover as Department of Justice employees didn’t mean that they weren’t actual Feds. This was as much self-defense as rooting out the truth behind who initiated the assassinations of the OSHA investigators. Nine innocent men, all unarmed, had died by fire to keep a secret here in the Norfolk boatyard.

Clearly the shooters who had arrived and immediately opened fire were not police officers. Furthermore they would definitely know what was going on and who had likely been behind the others’ deaths.

Blancanales held off moving on to another target, keeping cover between himself and the other gunmen. These shooters were wearing armor, so he waited to be sure that the 4.6 mm bullets from his machine pistol had been able to punch through to his enemy’s vitals.

It turned out that Blancanales had made the right choice, because the staggered killer scrambled back to his feet a second time, but he wasn’t standing still to be the target for further full-auto hammering. Even as the gunman retreated, two more riflemen opened up, their rifles chattering and pelting the hunk of rubble that Blancanales used as a shield. Unfortunately for them, they missed, bullets smashing against mass too dense for their 5.56 mm rounds to penetrate, and Blancanales had mapped out a line of retreat in case he was attacked from that vector.

Blancanales paused just enough to unclip another of his grenades from a small fanny pack. He plucked the cotter pin and released the spoon, igniting the blaster’s fuse before hurling it toward the rattle of enemy weapons. There was a brief pause in the shooting, accompanied by an almost comical cry of “Shit!”

The humor of the moment was punctuated by the earth-shattering roar of the grenade’s detonation, body parts spiraling away from the source of the well-placed blast. A distant explosion hadn’t been able to shred through a steel helmet and trauma plates, but the enemy commandos didn’t have that kind of hard shell on their legs. Even if they did, a sheet of kinetic force severed the limbs where the joints in the armor were weakest.

“We’re hoping to get one or two alive, remember,” Schwarz said grimly.

“Acknowledged,” Blancanales replied. “Let’s hope they have the same orders.”