Extreme Arsenal

“I think I blew the eardrum. Sorry, mate,” McCarter answered.

Reasoner shuddered. “You’re insane.”

“I just don’t have any patience for smugglers,” McCarter responded. “Or the bastards who make it easy for them.”

“Listen…” Reasoner began.

“You were kicked out of the regiment for selling off our equipment,” McCarter said. “Your lawyer kept you from becoming some bloke’s boyfriend in prison, but if it were up to me, you’d be lucky to take a long drop off a short rope.”

“I didn’t sell to the Provos,” Reasoner answered. “And it was old gear…back stock.”

McCarter was unmoved. “What berth?”

“They’re setting sail in five minutes. You’ll never catch them,” Reasoner replied.

“Leave it to me,” McCarter said. “What berth?”

“Thirteen,” Reasoner answered.

“Close your eyes, Chris,” McCarter ordered.

The official closed his good eye. “You’re not going to shoot me, are you?”

Silence.

It took Reasoner nearly five minutes for him to get up the courage to see if McCarter was still there.

MCCARTER KNEW that he was going to be cutting it close. Not only was he armed with only a pair of pistols that weren’t ones he was familiar with, and Reasoner’s .357 Magnum revolver, but he was all alone. A takedown of a ship would need at least two more people, as Able Team had proved several times. He’d have preferred to have all four of his Phoenix Force teammates on hand to throw in against the smugglers on the Kobiyashi.

It would have to do. The Phoenix Force leader didn’t want to lose track of the boat. Already the sailors were undoing the moorings. The bow’s rope, big and fat, was being hauled up over the railing while two sailors unwound the stern cable. Crewmen jogged up the gangplank.

“All aboard!” came the call from the deck.

It was now or never.

One more thing slowed the Phoenix Force leader. There was a possibility that the entire crew on the ship wasn’t implicated in the transport of a team of assassins. McCarter was audacious and ruthless, but he wasn’t a cold-blooded murderer and when he fought, he fought against those he knew were killers and had deadly intent. He’d fall back to the handguns as a means of last resort, which meant that he was even further behind the curve.

“Hey! We’re casting off,” a Filipino sailor called to him. The round-faced seaman was stocky, his shoulders betraying a burly strength. “You can’t come aboard.”

“Official business, no time for a chin-wag,” McCarter said as he barely slowed, sidestepping the Filipino.

The stocky sailor grabbed McCarter’s arm and pulled open his jacket to reveal a revolver. The former SAS commando pivoted and broke the Filipino’s nose with the point of his elbow, then plucked the revolver from the man’s waistband. “I told you, no time to talk, mate.”

A second sailor rushed up, but instead of helping out his stunned shipmate, he reached for his own weapon. McCarter sighed and pistol-whipped the man across the jaw with the barrel of the Filipino’s revolver, twisting the newcomer’s handgun out of his grasp. A sweep of his feet across the man’s ankles, and the Briton dumped the man to the ground. With a quick flip, he had a revolver in each fist.

“Anyone else want to slow me down?” McCarter growled.

The other sailors who were handling the moorings looked at the armed man, dressed in black and packing a brace of handguns after three quick strikes. They didn’t want to see what he could do with bullets and took off running. McCarter let them flee and continued up the gangplank.

A figure rushed to the railing and McCarter spotted a submachine gun in his grasp. Uzis weren’t standard issue for security forces on a ship, so he threw himself flat on the slanted walkway. Both revolvers spoke with thunderous reports. Twin .38-caliber slugs chopped into the gunner and threw him onto his back before he could aim. Autofire ripped from the dead man’s assault weapon into the night sky.

“Good news and bad news,” McCarter muttered to himself as he leaped to his feet and raced to the deck. “Good news, now I know who the bad guys are. Bad news, they got bigger guns than I do.”

On deck, he looked both ways and watched as another pair of gunmen burst from the wheelhouse. Their weapons were an odd mix, one carrying a battered AK-47, the other packing another of the compact Bofors CBJs. McCarter took the CBJ gunner in the face with two slugs from his right-hand weapon, and put a bullet from the other revolver through the wrist of the AK man’s trigger hand. The rifleman screamed as he clutched his ruined limb to his chest, his weapon forgotten as it tumbled over the rail.

McCarter rushed toward the wheelhouse and discarded the partially spent revolvers. He skidded to a halt, scooped up the fallen assault rifle, shouldered it and looked for more targets. The wounded gunman above pulled his sidearm and leaned over the railing. The Phoenix Force commander sidestepped before a bullet exploded on the metal at his feet. Then he pulled the AK’s trigger.

Nothing. He racked the bolt and chambered a new round, the old case spinning from the breech. He tried to shoot again, but there was still nothing. The injured guard fired again, twice, but upside down and using the wrong hand, his accuracy was off, not that McCarter left himself as a stationary target. He popped the magazine and saw that the casings were green and rusted from too many years at sea.

As another shot chased him, the Phoenix Force veteran dived behind the bulkhead, leaving the AK-47 behind. Poor weapons maintenance would have gotten him killed. He reached for the alloy-framed Glock G-34 and drew it, the safety snicked off reflexively. McCarter suddenly felt very comfortable with the new handgun. It was blockier than his sleek Browning, but the muzzle thickness helped add to the heft that made the balance feel almost like his confiscated pistol.

The door crashed open and a fat thug with a shotgun burst onto the deck. McCarter didn’t wait for the newcomer to aim, triggering the G-34 twice. High-velocity 127-grain hollowpoint rounds slammed into the big guard, and it was as if the man had hit an invisible force field. The shotgunner collapsed to the walkway with a sigh and a thud. McCarter leaped over the dead man and cut into the door he’d exited.

A black-armored phantom with the same gleaming helmet as he’d encountered the night before loomed at the top of the stairs. McCarter dived into a hallway as armor-piercing slugs smashed the floor where he’d stood instants before. Tucked into a shoulder roll, he somersaulted another few feet and came up facing the stairwell. He let the Glock hang in his left hand, yanked out Chris Reasoner’s .357 Magnum revolver and thumbed back the hammer.

The armored assassin stepped into view and received a hot blast of 125-grain lead, screaming along at nearly 1500 feet per second. The 9 mm might not have penetrated the goon’s armor, and the hollowpoint round didn’t do much better, but the high-powered bullet did flatten the machine gunner. McCarter snapped up the Glock and punched a single 127-grain bullet into the gun of the attacker, wrenching the Bofors autoweapon from the killer’s grasp.

McCarter followed up with a solid kick to the helmeted man’s chin. A sickening crunch sounded and the gunman was stilled. The Stony Man commando’s gamble had paid off. There was no way the automatic weapons and body armor would have gotten through aircraft or train customs, but the bribery at the docks and the nature of boat smuggling would have made it all but impossible for someone to truly check out the ship. Security was tight in the post 9/11 era, but short of dismantling the freighter, there would have been no way to find everything.

The stunned, armored assassin struggled to get up, but McCarter stooped and pulled the helmet off the killer. “Who’re you working for?”

The hit man looked down the muzzle of the 9 mm Glock. “I’m not going to talk.”

McCarter growled and pistol-whipped the armored killer into nerveless unconsciousness. Boots pounded on the metal grating that made up the steps, and he shifted his aim back to the stairwell.

The first gunman into the open caught a .357 Magnum slug in the groin. Pelvis shattered, his legs stopped working and he plopped into a heap in the hallway. Two more guards tripped over the fallen seaman, their weapons clattering as they struggled to stay up. McCarter caught one of the pair as he bent to grab his assault rifle and punched a 9 mm round through the joint of his shoulder and neck. Bone and muscle were destroyed instantly as the hollowpoint tunneled deep and stopped in the sentry’s left lung. The body smashed face-first into the floor and flopped to one side.

“Don’t do it!” McCarter ordered the other gunman as he reached for a revolver under his sweater.

The guard paused for a moment, but a slamming door behind the Briton spun his attention away. He dropped to the ground as another of the thugs cut loose with a charge of buckshot. Pellets zipped over McCarter’s head and crashed into the paralyzed gunner, a salvo of shot blowing him off his feet.

The Phoenix Force leader took out the shotgunner with two shots from the thundering Magnum revolver, then turned to look at the carnage.

“I’m dying, man,” the wounded gunman whispered, blood rasping in his lungs.

McCarter looked helplessly at the bloody chest of the seaman. He was skilled enough in battlefield medicine to stop lethal blood loss from a single bullet wound, but the chopped hamburger that remained in the path of the 12-gauge’s violence was larger than the Briton’s fully spread hand. He tore a wad of cloth from a corpse’s shirt, but by the time he made a compress out of it, the wounded sailor had expired.

McCarter frowned in frustration. He’d come onto this ship to get answers, not to leave behind total carnage. He shook his head in disgust and checked the load on Reasoner’s revolver. Three shots remained in the cylinder, so he stuffed it away as a backup weapon. He checked the load in the Glock and the 17-shot reservoir was still more than half full. He pocketed the partially depleted magazine and fed it a fresh stick.

McCarter holstered the Glock and picked up the Bofors, but cast it aside when he found that the receiver had been smashed by the 9 mm slug he’d punched into it. Instead, he picked up an old battered Sterling. Remembering his encounter with the rotten ammo in the AK-47, he pointed at a wooden crate marked “shoes” and pulled the trigger for a short burst, using the cargo to absorb any ricocheting rounds. The submachine gun burped to the SAS veteran’s satisfaction and he frisked the dead man for spare magazines. He found two more curved 32-round sticks for the Sterling and pocketed them.

He moved to where the latest gunmen had entered the superstructure on the freighter, and saw an assembly of figures heave something long over the side. McCarter shouldered the Sterling.

“Don’t move!” he warned.

A pair of black-clad assassins dived over the railing as another man spun. McCarter triggered a burst into the gunman. Bullets sparked against ceramic trauma plating and the gunman’s helmet, and the Phoenix Force pro rolled back through the door to escape a salvo of 6.5 mm armor-piercing rounds. As it was, only falling to the deck had saved him as the Bofors bullets punched through the steel bulkhead above him.

The torrent of withering fire kept McCarter pinned long enough for whomever was on the deck to escape. When there was a lull in the shooting, he swung out and saw that the railing was clear. Only the churning white water produced by the Zodiac boat’s engines gave any indication where the enemy had gone, and by the time he rushed to the bow of the ship, they were out of range for the machine pistol he carried. Even though he’d fired on the run, there was no sign that the Sterling had done anything. He let the submachine gun hang on its sling and let out a sigh of frustration.