Drawpoint

The knifer remained steady and focused.

“Look, mate,” he said, trying to sound calm. “it’s over. We don’t want to kill you. We want to question you. Play it right and you could walk away from this.” While that last was, strictly speaking, a lie, McCarter needed the guy alive. There were too many questions to be answered, and they had about all they were likely to get from Gopalan. Something was afoot, something big, and if the Stony Man teams were to get to the bottom of it, they needed to start producing more answers than questions.

The man lunged.

McCarter swore and fired, putting a single round between the man’s eyes. There was no other choice; if he tried to play fancy trick-shooting games with a charging blade, it could mean his life. The would-be killer was dead before his body completed its fall to the catwalk, the knife clanging on the rusty metal.

“Bloody hell,” McCarter said once more.

CHAPTER FOUR

The apartment building was as decrepit a structure as any the members of Able Team were likely to find in the area. Looking around, Carl Lyons shook his head. The buildings here had a sense of history. It was obvious this had once been a much better neighborhood. Now it was dying, rotting from the inside out, a victim of the animals who lived there and preyed on one another. Able Team had visited many such places in their battle against terror and crime. Still, even a hardened former cop and veteran counterterrorist like Lyons felt a pang of regret whenever he saw a place like this one, so badly gone to seed.

They were dressed casually. Lyons wore a bomber jacket over denims, while Blancanales and Gadgets wore slacks, polo shirts and windbreakers. Their nondescript attire did nothing to conceal the weapons in their hands. Lyons would normally have moved much more discreetly, but they had received a scrambled call from the Farm only minutes before reaching their destination that morning. Phoenix Force had taken down an ambush in India, and no one knew precisely how the enemy was a step ahead of what the Stony Man teams were doing. Given that, the former L.A. detective didn’t intend to get blindsided. They were going in, yes, and they were going in hot.

The target was an apartment building, and specifically a unit on its top floor. The site was part of the list produced by the Farm’s computer wizards. Each target on the priority-ordered list was linked to a person or persons of interest relevant to the WWUP or the ecoterror groups funding them, as Kurtzman had explained it. The fundamental mission had not changed. Both Able Team and Phoenix Force were shaking trees to see what fell out of them.

These trees, of course, often bore lethal fruit.

The shotgun Carl Lyons held in his calloused fists was a Daewoo USAS-12, a massive selective fire 12-gauge shotgun styled something like an M-16 and fitted with a 20-round polymer drum magazine. Lyons carried extra drums in the green canvas war bag slung across his chest. Schwarz and Blancanales carried similar bags. The rest of Lyons’s armament consisted of his personal handgun, the Colt Python, as well as a Columbia River Knife and Tool “M-16” tactical folding knife. The blades carried by the other team members were of the same brand but in different styles. Blancanales had opted for a fixed blade CRKT Ultima, while Schwarz carried an “M-18” folder model.

Schwarz was armed with a Kissinger-tuned specialty, the silenced Beretta 93-R machine pistol, and several 20-round magazines were in the pouches of his web belt, under his windbreaker. Blancanales had opted for something a little less exotic, but no less effective—a short-barreled CAR-15 with a collapsible stock and vertical foregrip complete with flashlight unit.

The three men took the stairs leading up to the target apartment with practiced precision, covering one another with Lyons in the lead.

They had discussed the fastest way to breach the door to the apartment. Lyons’s first thought had been to use a portable battering ram of the type used by SWAT teams, but the warning from the Farm had nixed that plan. He did not want any member of Able Team to be vulnerable, even temporarily, if armed hostiles were waiting on the other side of the door. In the end he had simply loaded the Daewoo’s chamber with a fléchette breaching round. The first shot from the awesomely powerful weapon would be to take down the lock, after which Lyons and his teammates would blitz the door and overwhelm whoever was waiting on the other side.

The hallways through which they walked were padded with stained, threadbare carpet, which softened the impacts of their combat boots. The hallways smelled of cooking food. Lyons could hear a baby crying through one of the doors on a lower floor; he signaled to Schwarz and Blancanales and frowned. His warning was clear. There were innocents nearby and they could risk no collateral casualties.

Their earbud transceivers were active, but Lyons didn’t want to risk even a whisper as they neared the target doorway just past the top-floor landing. He signaled to his teammates, who took up positions on either side of the door to back him up. Lyons aimed the USAS-12 and braced himself. He looked to his teammates both of whom nodded.

Lyons pulled the trigger.

The shotgun blast disintegrated the lock. The big ex-cop immediately slammed the sole of his combat boot into the spot immediately left of the hole, slamming the flimsy hollow-core door open. He led Able Team into the apartment, his weapon sweeping the room for targets. Blancanales and Schwarz flanked him, taking opposite sides of the room as he advanced. They would sweep and clear in both directions, each man covering the other to prevent any nasty surprises.

“Clear!” Lyons shouted. The living room was empty save for a broken and half-collapsed flea market sofa and an ancient console television boasting a bent pair of rabbit ears. Pizza boxes were piled in a corner of the room, next to two blue plastic bins into which empty beer and soda cans had been piled. While the apartment itself was typical of the hovels third-rate scumbags occupied, Lyons thought to himself, it was surprisingly clean.

“Bedroom’s clear!” Schwarz called from the next room.

“Bathroom!” Blancanales sang out. “Got a live one!”

His shotgun at a low ready, Lyons found Blancanales standing over a twenty-something male who was doing his best to look nonchalant—while sitting on the toilet. He had been reading a magazine when the team had busted down his door, apparently. It was crumpled on the floor at his feet, on top of the fuzzy blue bathmat that covered most of the floor in the tiny bathroom. The title Earth Action was emblazoned across it.

“Is there anyone else here?” Blancanales asked calmly, the stubby barrel of his rifle trained on the young man’s face.

“No,” the man shook his head.

“Your name?” the Hispanic commando asked in the same even, almost friendly tone.

“Ryan,” the young man answered. “Ryan Pinter.”

“Well, Mr. Pinter—” Blancanales lowered the CAR-15 “—I suggest you cooperate fully. You’re in a lot of trouble.”

“But…but…I didn’t do anything!”

“We’ll be the judge of that,” Lyons said, easily playing bad cop to Blancanales’s good.

“First things first,” the Hispanic commando said. “Why don’t you, well, pull your pants up. You’ll be joining us in the living room.”

“Is anyone else expected here?” Lyons snarled.

“No, no, not for hours,” Pinter admitted readily. “Look, please, I haven’t done anything wrong. I don’t know what this is about, but—”

“Oh, you know,” Lyons said, planting a beefy palm between Pinter’s shoulder blades and propelling him into the living room as the young man left the bathroom, still hitching at his pants. Pinter almost collided with the couch and tried to crawl up into a ball on it, looking up at each of the armed men who had suddenly invaded his world.

“Look, you can’t just break in here and…Do you have a warrant?”

Lyons, playing his part now, raised the USAS-12 menacingly. “This is my warrant,” he said.

“You’re a member of the World Workers United Party,” Blancanales informed him.

“So that’s what this is?” Pinter became indignant. “You’re rousting me because of my political beliefs? Oh, man, I knew this Patriot Act thing was going to turn into oppression! You can’t suppress my political beliefs at gunpoint! I’ll sue, I’ll sue and you’ll be—”

“We’ll be what?” Lyons asked. “You are aware, aren’t you, that the director of the WWUP here in Illinois was killed while attempting to murder federal law-enforcement officers?”

Pinter looked down, the wind taken out of his sails for a moment. “I heard he was maybe in an embezzlement scandal.” The young man shook his head. “That he tried to shoot his way out rather than get caught. That isn’t right, man, but it shows you that capitalist greed can infect even those who—”

“Shove a sock in it,” Lyons growled. “I’m not interested in your speeches.”

“But look, man, you can’t hold every member of the party responsible for what one guy does.”

“Three guys, actually,” Lyons said. “Or don’t you read the news?” An officially scrubbed version of the events at the WWUP facility had been released to the media, complete with rumors of corruption as the official reason behind the shootings. The rumor mill had already started to manufacture plausible backstories, with the assistance of a twenty-four-hour cable news media desperate for unfounded speculation with which to fill its schedule. All of this put the public off the trail, as was intended. There was no point in starting a panic—though at this point, even the Farm didn’t know enough to guess as to why the WWUP director had been so fast on the trigger—with the real story behind the events, and of course Stony Man’s covert operatives had to be shielded. Lyons knew that Brognola’s heartburn only intensified every time Able was involved in so public a shooting, but it went with the territory. The big former L.A. cop had been as surprised as anyone when the probe had turned to gunplay so fast. The fact that it had was just proof for Brognola’s theory that big things were happening, or about to happen. The worm in front of Able Team now could well prove the key to unlocking some part of the puzzle. If not that, he might lead them to those who could.

“This is not about politics. At least, it’s not about your public politics. You’re also member of the Earth Action Front,” Blancanales said calmly. “A highly ranked member, in fact.”

“Look, man, you got it all wrong,” Pinter said desperately. “I’m an environmentalist, sure. Green Party, a few other groups. I care about my planet, is that a crime? But I’m not in the Earth Action Front.”

Lyons snorted and lowered the shotgun. He stepped away long enough to duck into the bathroom, grab the magazine Pinter had been reading and throw it at him. Ryan flinched as the dog-eared, glossy pages hit him.

“So what’s that?” Lyons demanded. “A little light reading?”

“ Earth Action is a reputable publication,” Ryan almost whined. “Just because the Earth Action Front names themselves after a green magazine, you can’t—”

Lyons snarled, set the shotgun on the carpeted floor and drew the Colt Python from his shoulder holster. He leveled the heavy barrel at Pinter’s face. “Let’s just stop dicking around, shall we?”

“Ironman,” Blancanales said, sounding concerned. He, too, was playing a role for Pinter’s benefit.

“Shut up.” Lyons turned away from Pinter, to Blancanales, and winked. Then he turned back to the terrified young man. “You’re a radical activist who uses saving mother Earth as an excuse for supporting violent causes, and you hang out with people who do the same, or worse. We’re here because your activities aren’t secret. You’re on a list, kid. You’re on a bunch of lists, in fact. When we cross-index those lists we get the profile of somebody we think is just screwy enough to firebomb a fast-food restaurant, or maybe, just maybe, take a shot at a federal officer.”