Splintered Sky

“Got it,” Grimaldi replied.

“We’re closing in on the first airstrip,” Blancanales stated. On his map was a marker of a position that had been provided by Lyons’s contacts within the U.S. Border Patrol. “And he’s circling for a descent.”

“Doesn’t mean anything,” Lyons replied. Still, he reached for the DSA-58 carbine he had stashed under his seat. He kept its stock folded, for better maneuverability inside the confines of the helicopter. He idly wished for the nose sensors on the Hughes 500 NOTAR they’d utilized only a few hours before, but the JetRanger had the kind of speed and range Grimaldi required to ferry them on their search of the desert. The airstrip was quiet and still, but camouflage netting could have concealed a small battalion from unaided eyes. FLIR and Terrain Radar would have given them a better heads-up. He clicked on his open line to the Farm.

“Bear, got anything on satellite?”

“The sun’s been baking the area enough to make any thermal imaging a mess. Radar shows you following something, but its signature is faint and indecipherable,” Kurtzman answered. “It’s an ultralight?”

“Yeah,” Lyons confirmed. “It could be made of any one of a dozen materials that wouldn’t show up well on a radar scan. Even its engine would be masked by the superstructure. Are there any vehicles in the area?”

“Anything outside is probably covered,” Kurtzman told him. “The signal isn’t coming back clean, so it’s possible that someone’s got camouflage netting with radar-absorbent material in it. Expect trouble, but I don’t have any magic figures for you.”

“I’ve got the outline of a hangar,” Blancanales called out. “It looks large enough for half a dozen Cessnas. It’s covered in camouflage netting, and low profile to blend into the hills.”

Lyons squinted. There was motion near the airstrip as the Ultralight suddenly banked hard, powering into a climb to push above the altitude of the JetRanger. Grimaldi was watching their aerial quarry, but the movement on the ground was fluid motion of fabric tossed aside.

“Ironman, we’ve got signatures!” Kurtzman shouted. “Looks like…”

“Machine guns,” Lyons bellowed, jolting Grimaldi into a hard juke to one side. Spearing tracers burned through the air only inches from Lyons’s window, twin streams of glowing streaks confirming the dual-mounted .50-caliber machine guns raking the sky. Another position fluttered to life farther down the strip, and Blancanales shoved his folded FAL’s barrel through the window port, holding down the trigger for half of the 30-round extended magazine.

With Grimaldi engaging in evasive action, the Puerto Rican’s fire only swept the machine-gun nest with a few glancing shots, but it was enough to force the antiaircraft position to miss the JetRanger. Still, Blancanales was satisfied with the results of his suppression fire.

Lyons had his DSA-58 burping out rounds to harass the other antiaircraft nest, but he knew that there wasn’t much of a chance of scoring an easy hit, not with Grimaldi weaving through the sky. “Jack, we need to get out of here. At least set us down out of range of the twin mounts.”

“Make me a hole, guys,” Grimaldi said.

Blancanales thumbed a round into the breech of his grenade launcher and fired. The shell hit, spewing a noxious-looking green cloud that obscured one of the machine-gun nests. In the meantime, Lyons unslung his Mossberg Cruiser 500, ejecting its load of Brenneke shells and quickly thumbing in a load of ferret rounds. The 12-gauge shell spit a tear-gas bomb toward the other twin-mounted Fifty. Being a solid round, the shotgun tear-gas shell had the range to pepper the enemy gunnery position. By tromboning the slide as fast as he pulled the trigger, Lyons saturated the nest with a blinding, stinging caldron of capsicum gas. The machine gunner, his sinuses and respiratory passages swollen in reaction to the horrendously hot-pepper extract, held down the spade trigger on the heavy machine gun, firing uncontrollably. His tear ducts felt as if they were filled with scalding hot acid, and he swept the half of the sky that was empty.

Blancanales’s smoker was followed by a second, thickening the turgid green cloud, giving the helicopter room to maneuver.

“Put us down,” Lyons told Grimaldi. “If we back off, they won’t stick around.”

“Roger,” Grimaldi answered. “Luckily, Pol laid down a good landing marker.”

Lyons looked to see that the ace Stony Man pilot had swooped the helicopter over Blancanales’s thick green fog. The rotor wash pushed away the cloud, and Grimaldi let the aircraft drop right on top of the second machine-gun nest. The starboard landing skid hit the frame of the twin mount and tore it from its moorings, digging it into the sand.

Lyons and Blancanales snapped out of their harnesses and were out the chopper’s doors in an instant. The Able Team leader paused only long enough to ram the pistol grip of his Mossberg into the jaw of one of the antiaircraft crew they’d landed among. Bone shattered under the impact, the gunner’s head flopping loosely on a rubbery neck. Blancanales’s FAL carbine burped out a short burst, churning 7.62 mm slugs through the intestines of a second gun crewman.

Lyons didn’t have to tell Grimaldi to take off, as the helicopter popped into the sky like a cork. Already the tear gas was wearing off on the first machine gun nest. “Pol!”

Blancanales whirled, feeding his M-203 again. Snapping the shoulder stock straight on his rifle, he triggered the grenade launcher. A 40-mm round spiraled through the air between the two antiaircraft positions, the shell’s travels seeming to take forever as Grimaldi struggled to gain altitude. When it felt like the first crew of enemy gunners could have recovered and taken a nap to sleep off the effects of the tear gas, the grenade landed at their feet. Six-point-five ounces of high explosive converted from solid potential chemical energy into a thunderclap of pressure and heat. The twin-mounted machine gun was shorn into its component parts by a wave of force that turned its crew’s legs and lower torsos into a rocketing halo of jellied meat. Their top halves were simply lobbed out of the sandbag ring, bouncing on the tarmac.

Lyons traded his Mossberg for the DSA carbine to deal with a group of newcomers to the battle, teams of men exploding through two doors of the hangar, brandishing automatic weapons. Lyons’s full-auto fire lanced into the squad, stitching torsos with high-velocity bullets that exploded through bone and vaporized tunnels through muscle and organ tissue.

“Damn it! Get them!” a voice shouted. Lyons narrowed his eyes and spotted a short, balding man with lean, cruel features, tripping a memory in the Able Team commander’s mental mug book. He dismissed his familiarity with the enemy leader, swinging his DSA’s chattering stream of automatic fire toward his slender opponent. The enemy leader charged ahead of the scything arc of supersonic lead, saving his own life, but causing Lyons to mow down three of his forces.

Blancanales added his autofire to the conflagration, but the fleeing leader was inside the protective walls of the hangar. Rather than being deterred, the Able Team grenadier stuck an M-433 HEDP round into his launcher and fired. When the dual-purpose round touched the wall of the hangar, its copper armor-penetrating shrapnel charge spit out the prefab wall material and molten metal in a cone of lethal devastation that slashed through whatever defenders stood on the other side of the door. Screams of agony split the air.

Lyons emptied his DSA through the hole, then transitioned to his six-inch Colt Python. The airplane access doors groaned ominously and buckled as a thunderous force exerted itself. Moments after the doors deformed, they toppled over, concussive force shearing them from their moorings. Inside, a Cessna Stationaire idled, its propeller sucking smoke from the detonations into spirals of inky grayness. The dark-clad, blond figure stood in a half-open door and brought up a pair of flashing Uzi submachine guns.

Lyons and Blancanales dived for cover as a salvo of 9 mm slugs stabbed at them. The Able Team leader grunted as his body armor stopped a pair of slugs, and he triggered the Colt Python, knowing it wouldn’t be enough to stop the prop plane. He missed the twin-machine-pistol-wielding enemy leader as the Cessna shot forward. Another plane closed its access door and followed the lead plane, but having started later, it was slower, enabling Blancanales to cut loose with his FAL rifle.

The engine belched smoke as 7.62 mm slugs tore into it. The high-velocity bullets shattered the pistons, freezing up the propeller. Lyons let the Python drop to the tarmac and he unslung his Mossberg 500. Tromboning the slide, he hammered a blast of slugs into the fuselage and passenger cabin. Twelve-gauge missiles punched through fiberglass and flesh, tearing into the gunmen jammed into the back of the plane.

Blancanales’s grenade launcher chugged loudly, a third Cessna disappearing in a cloud of flame and splinters.

All the while, Lyons watched the lead plane, and the enemy commander, the same slender figure who’d raced into the darkness before. The Cessna climbed until it was a tiny speck in thousands of miles of empty sky. It was out of eyesight in a minute, but it was not out of sight of the satellites that the Farm had watching the airstrip.

“That’s twice you’ve gotten away,” Lyons snarled. “But we’ll see where you’re going. There won’t be a third time.”

CHAPTER FIVE

The Pacific, en route to Thailand

As they were making their preparations for the penetration into China, there were a few things on Phoenix Force’s side.

The first was the requirement that orbital launch stations be as close to the equator as possible, which limited the facility to being on the southern coast of the nation, far closer to the equator than even NASA’s launch center in Cape Canaveral. While Florida was below the 25th Parallel, the south China coast was well below the 20th Parallel, the Tropic of Cancer. The nearness to the equator added to the facility of getting to orbital velocity by using the Earth’s rotation for help. Since space vehicles orbited simply by missing the Earth’s surface and atmosphere in their million-mile “fall,” it required less energy to attain the altitude necessary to enable that skillful task of throwing themselves at the ground and missing.

Considering the nature of Stony Man Farm’s previous conflicts with the Chinese government in their sponsorship of terrorism and espionage against the United States, Phoenix Force and the Farm had developed dozens of infiltration protocols to get into the nation, contingencies that had been set up for other enemy nations that sponsored the atrocities McCarter and his men spent their lives fighting against. Actually using one of those contingency plans wasn’t something that McCarter relished, but there was the chance that this operation might be coming to the Chinese government’s rescue.

McCarter mused on that for a moment as he reassembled his CZ P.01 pistol. A modern update of his favored Browning Hi-Power, with its safety replaced by an easy-to-reach decocking lever, it had the same ergonomics and high capacity as his preferred Browning, but its Czech origin meant it wouldn’t be traced back to the U.S. if it was lost in the heat of battle. He’d field-stripped the gun to ensure the mechanism was sound, with no burrs on any springs or bearing surfaces that could have compromised reliability. He loaded a 13-round magazine into the butt of the gun, racked the slide, thumbed down the decocker and holstered it. The P.01s were Czech police issue, but used 9 mm ammunition available around the world, including China. The same went for Phoenix Force’s Type 95 assault rifles. The compact bullpups were ugly, and oddly balanced, but they were tough, reliable and used Chinese military ammunition, the 5.8 mm cartridge easily garnered from enemy forces. His and Calvin James’s rifles were fitted with 35 mm under-barrel grenade launchers, while Gary Manning eschewed the compact bullpup for the NORINCO Type 79 self-loading sniper rifle. The Phoenix Force marksman preferred having a long-range weapon, and the 7.62 mm round had an effective range of 1300 meters.

There would be no disguising their appearance, so the team was decked out with a variant of the Land Warrior combat suit. Stony Man Farm had helped them out with the camouflage pattern that would match the area they were inserting into. The Land Warrior suits were complex weaves of Kevlar and Nomex that T. J. Hawkins and Gary Manning were currently stenciling camou patterns onto. The rifles were being color detailed with camouflage paint by Rafael Encizo while Calvin James went over his medical kit to ensure that they were ready for whatever infections and injuries they could incur. Radiation poison inoculations were also being set up, given the chance of external exposure to lethal Iridium-132. The dense, radioactive metal could cause gamma radiation burns and poisoning.

A layer of charcoal filtering underneath the Land Warrior suits would provide some protection, but gamma radiation was of a powerful, high-frequency energy wave that required high-density materials, such as lead aprons, to stop it. Unfortunately, that kind of protective covering would prove too bulky to wear into a stealth operation, and would hinder movement to such a degree that a firefight would leave them as practically stationary targets.

McCarter’s satellite phone warbled and he picked it up. “News?”

“We’ve been digging into SAD internal communiqués. We ended up with a few discarded, zero-filed memos in their trash,” Barbara Price announced. “Someone’s keeping information in SAD from getting out about anomalies in their military launch programs. The higher-ups are not getting discrepancies in field reports on their threat matrix because someone’s deleting them.”

“I knew it didn’t make sense for the Chinese to try something big against the International Space Station,” McCarter said. “It’s too risky a move that could start a nuclear exchange.”

“Renegade factions inside Chinese intel?” Price mused. “Or someone who tapped into them?”

“We’ll have a chinwag with the blokes running the joint when we drop in, Barb,” McCarter returned.

“We’ll keep tracing SAD communications to see if there’s evidence of a larger conspiracy within the government,” Price said. “So far, the way they’re smoke stacking the information, it looks like it might just be a small cadre involved, probably reinforced by international support.”

A beep sounded, distracting Price. She put McCarter on hold for a few moments.

“We’ve got confirmation of activity in Mexico,” Price broke in. “Able encountered a group of enemy soldiers in Sonora, utilizing an airstrip. They reinforced it with antiaircraft machine guns and a full squadron of aircraft on hand.”

“Any escapes?” McCarter asked.

“Carl has confirmed that the same one who got away from them at the border was at the strip. He took off under a wave of suppression fire, but he was the only one who did,” Price said. “We’ve got satellites tracking their plane.”

McCarter rubbed his chin. “Then he won’t get away.”