Critical Intelligence

CHAPTER THREE

Colombia

Carl Lyons lifted his Bushnell binoculars and scanned the FARC camp below. Able Team’s position was located right above the only road leading into the terrorist outpost. This was a hammer-and-anvil operation, with Able Team serving as the anvil.

The readout on the range finder built into the optics showed 204 meters. Sweat trickled down Lyons’s body, sliding over his feverish skin to collect at his armpits, navel and groin. He was a big man and heavily muscled, which made the heat a burden to him. He was growing crankier by the second.

Behind him in the brush Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz slapped a mosquito. The Able Team electronics genius was crouched next to a 80 mm mortar. Lined up in front of the squat weapon’s base plate were six rounds: two high explosive, two antipersonnel, two white phosphorous. He lowered a compass and quickly adjusted the angle of the tube based on his reading.

On the ground a tripod-mounted electronic device hummed softly. The size of a Power-Book it had an antenna dish set in the top that slowly rotated. On loan from the Pentagon through the DARPA—Defense Advance Research and Projects Agency—program, the XM-12 was a field-portable scrambler unit capable of disrupting digital signals in addition to radio waves.

Out in front of Schwarz and Lyons the third member of Able Team lay belly-down on the soggy ground. Ex-Special Forces sergeant Rosario Blancanales had his right eye suctioned up close against the rubber cup of his sniper scope.

“You heard the lady,” he growled. “Let’s do this thing.”

“Phoenix inbound,” Grimaldi informed them over the com link. “Adios, assholes,” Blancanales muttered to the narcoterrorists. Behind him Schwarz picked up the first HE round.

In the reticule of his scope the Puerto Rican’s crosshairs were settled on a bearded FARC soldier manning the machine gun position at the entrance to the camp.

The man wore dark khaki fatigues stained with sweat. His tangle of long, greasy black hair was kept back by a shapeless black beret, and he wore a 9 mm Browning Hi-Power in a belt holster opposite the sheath for a wicked-looking machete.

He laughed, and blunt, very white teeth stood out like neon against his walnut-brown complexion. On his web gear he carried a sat phone, which had first alerted Blancanales that this was a leader. Two other soldiers, much younger and beardless, stood around listening to the older man talk, M-16 A-2 assault rifles in their hands.

Blancanales slowly released his breath and felt his world narrow to the crosshairs of his scope. The FARC leader’s fatigue shirt was open to the belly, revealing an expanse of curly black hair across his lean chest. A gold chain hung down between the man’s pectoral muscles. Blancanales’s crosshairs centered there.

From the valley there was the sudden sound of an approaching helicopter. The man snapped his head around at the noise. The M-21 sniper rifle with folding paratrooper stock coughed once as Blancanales squeezed the trigger in a slow, controlled movement.

Across two hundred yards he saw the FARC leader jerk as the 7.62 mm NATO round struck him. In the sniper optic Blancanales saw blood halo out behind the man in a fine mist. The target half spun, crumpled to his knees, then fell forward on his face.

The two sentries standing next to the dead man swept up their weapons. They turned toward the sound of the helicopter, spun back toward the road from where Blancanales’s round had come. They brought their M-16s to their shoulders and started shouting in Spanish.

Lyons opened up with his cut-down M-60E.

He had the machine gun supported on a fallen log and fed from a green plastic, 200-round drum magazine. The weapon roared to life with a stuttering thunder as hot shell casings arced out of the receiver and spun to the forest floor.

The earth in front of the FARC sentries erupted in a series of geyser spouts as he walked his fire in on them. Behind him Schwarz released his hold on the mortar round, dropping it smoothly into the tube. It went off with a throaty bloop. Lyons’s rounds struck the two men.

The heavy-caliber bullets buzzed into the FARC sentries, hacking them up like spinning axes. They spun and jiggled like marionettes dancing for a puppeteer. They staggered, dropping their weapons, then flopped to the ground still quivering.

Schwarz’s 80 mm HE mortar round struck the camp dead center of the FARC motor pool. A black Ford Excursion with its roof cut off and massively oversize tires exploded. A ball of black smoke and orange flame mushroomed out. The vehicle was picked up off the ground and spun end-over-end, crumpling an old school bus repainted OD-green. Two five-ton Oso-12 trucks had their windows blown out, and a FARC soldier walking past was picked up and thrown like a rag doll.

Blancanales drew down on a running soldier and pulled his trigger. The man fell in a tangled heap.

Lyons eased up on his machine gun and activated his throat mike.

“Eagle, this is Hawk,” he said. “The front door is sealed. Deploy.”

“Copy,” the British-accented voice of David McCarter replied.

“Drop the WP right on the road in case anyone tries to drive out,” Lyons told Schwarz.

Schwarz nodded, then twisted the elevation knob on the mortar down several clicks. He lifted a white phosphorous round and dropped it in. The mortar went off and the round lobbed outward in a tight arc. The WP bomb struck the earth at the sentry post and detonated. Instantly the corpses at the impact site burst into flame.

Satisfied, Schwarz dropped his second round on the same angle and turned the entrance to the FARC camp into a raging conflagration.

“Keep an eye out for our Korean guest,” Lyons told Blancanales.

The ex-Green Beret nodded and continued sweeping his scope across the camp below them, hunting for targets of opportunity. Lyons opened up with his M-60E and directed suppressive fire on the FARC compound.

JACK GRIMALDI lifted the Blackhawk straight up out of the shallow jungle valley and bunny-hopped the bird over the hilltop. He put the nose of the helicopter down and raced forward, flying at treetop level. Two hundred yards out, his thumb flicked up the red safety cover to his rocket pod.

The FARC compound had two 20 mm antiaircraft emplacements providing security and they were Grimaldi’s first priority. He banked the bird hard, brought it on line with the narrow, fast-moving creek below and gunned the Blackhawk hard toward the camp.

His thumb depressed the button.

Instantly twin seven-inch rockets from pods under his weapons platform launched toward the camp. The projectiles whistled out, leaving contrails of white smoke behind them as they flew.

They both hit the sandbag walls encircling one of the 20 mm AA cannons and exploded. Gunny sacks, body parts and pieces of the guns went flying. Grimaldi worked his foot pedals and maneuvered the yoke. The Blackhawk banked hard, then spun around on its axis until the nose was orientated 120-degrees on a separate plane.

Through the windshield Grimaldi could see the antiaircraft crew scrambling to bring the 20 mm cannon to bear. Men’s faces twisted in fear and anger as they swarmed like ants around the gun placement. The helicopter remained level under Grimaldi’s hand. Again his thumb found the activation toggle.

Two more rockets leaped from their pods and swept forward, spiraling inward on synchronous flight paths. FARC gunners threw themselves out of the artillery pit in a desperate attempt to avoid the blast, but the twin explosions caught them in a concussive wave of lethal force.

“Here we go!” Grimaldi yelled into his throat mike.

The Blackhawk yawed hard, then settled into a hover fifty yards off the broken, uneven ground. Camouflage netting across the compound was ripped off and tossed into twisted heaps around the aluminum pole frame work, revealing men, sheds and tin-roofed buildings. A cloud of dust sprang up like fog as the topsoil was ripped from the ground by the force of rotor wash.

A thick hemp rope was kicked out of the cargo bay door. An instant later T. J. Hawkins, ex-Delta Force operator, appeared in the doorway. He wore a black sporting helmet and clear visors over his eyes. His hands were covered by thick welder’s gloves.

“Go! Go! Go!” David McCarter shouted.

Instantly, Hawkins stepped off the helicopter and onto the rope, sliding down the hemp weave like a firefighter on a pole. He was halfway down when the second man appeared in the door, then grasped the rope. Rafael Encizo, veteran anti-Castro guerrilla commando and combat diver, stepped off and dropped like a stone.

On the ground Hawkins shuffled forward a few places and took a knee, weapon coming up. Encizo dismounted the rope and took up a position to Hawkins’s left, his own weapon up as Calvin James, former Navy SEAL and trained medic, hit the rope.

Hawkins saw two men in Russian military fatigues run out of an outbuilding, weapons up. He drew down on them and used his M-4 carbine to cut them down.

Beside him Encizo unleashed his own firepower, an M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon, in stuttering bursts.

James hit the ground, bending at the knees to absorb the force of the impact, and a second later Gary Manning, former Canadian Special Forces soldier and explosives expert, also landed. The Canadian put his own M-60E in the pocket of his shoulder and fired over the heads of his teammates as he shuffled forward.

James peeled off to Encizo’s left, forming the anchor point on one end of their wedge formation as Manning shuffled into position on the opposite side. Behind them McCarter was on the ground, his M-4/M-203 combination carbine grenade launcher up and tracking for targets.

“Clear!” McCarter shouted.

The ex-SAS trooper walked smoothly forward, weapon up and finger on the trigger. Behind him the assault rope was disengaged by the helicopter loadmaster and door gunner, a sergeant from the 75th Ranger Division on loan to Stony Man’s blacksuit security detail.

“Copy!” Grimaldi responded.