Target Acquisition

Then he saw two men, one in the uniform of the Baghdad police, calmly eating. The two men continued eating as other men caught his tongue in a pair of pliers and cut it off with a bayonet. They had continued eating as the torturers had taken a ball-peen hammer to first his fingers and then his toes. Then, when his naked body was slick with his own blood, they had driven the slender shaft of an ice pick into his guts, perforating the large intestine and allowing his own fecal matter to flood into his system, causing sepsis.

From outside of the building the militia of the faithful held the Iraqi National Army bootlickers and their American allies at bay. The troops around the man now were those returning from the line to grab a meal and resupply. Despite their exhaustion and wounds the Shiite extremists remained upbeat—happy with their performance.

Then a vengeful god rained fire from the sky.

Abu Hafiza jumped out of his chair at the sound of the explosion. Around him his men scrambled to respond and he looked across the table to the Iraqi police officer Saheed el-Jaga.

“It’s them!” he hissed, stunned.

“Ridiculous. They never could have gotten close. It must be an air strike. I told you to leave the city,” Saheed el-Jaga snapped back.

Abu Hafiza thought about Ziad Jarrah sitting in Dubai like a spider at the center of his web. He thought of telling the crown prince how he had failed, how the Americans had driven him from the Shia stronghold in Baghdad.

“No,” the Shiite terrorist said simply. “I’m safer here.”

“I’m not!”

Then they heard the gunfire burning out around them and they knew it was more than an air strike. They knew then that against all odds the unknown commandos had made it into the Shiite slum, had come for them. They both realized that whoever these clandestine operators were they would never give up.

Instantly they rose up and ran to rally their men.

“Fall in around me!” Saheed el-Jaga snarled.

“To the roof and perimeter!” Abu Hafiza said in turn.

Men were scrambling into positions and snatching up weapons.

THE LINE DIPPED under Manning’s weight as he rode the Flying Fox cable car down the Kevlar zip-line. He sailed down the six stories and applied the hand brake at the last possible moment. He pivoted his feet up and struck the roof of the building on the soles of his combat boots.

Because of the size of his primary weapon, the cut-down M-60E, he couldn’t roll with the impact and instead bled off his momentum by sliding across the roof like a batter stealing second. With the last of his forward energy the big Canadian sat up and took a knee, swinging his machine gun into position and clicking off the safety.

Behind him he heard the sound as Calvin James hit the roof and rolled across one shoulder to come up with SPAS-15 ready. Above them they heard the muffled snaps as Hawkins cut loose with the silenced Mk 11 from his overwatch position. Below them in the courtyard around the sprawling house they heard men scream as the 7.62 mm rounds struck them.

Covering the exposed roof, Manning turned in a wide arc as Rafael Encizo slid down to the roof, putting his feet down and his shoulder against the line to arrest his forward motion. The Cuban combat swimmer came off his Flying Fox and tore his Hawk MM-1 from where it rested against the front of his torso.

McCarter landed right behind Encizo and rushed across the roof, M-4/M-203 up and in his hand. Gunfire burst out of a window in a mosque across the road. Manning shifted and triggered a burst of harassment fire from the hip. His rounds arced out across the space and slammed into the building, cracking the wall and shattering the lattice of a window. Red tracer fire skipped off the roof and bounced deeper into the city.

Above the heads of Phoenix Force in their black rubber protective masks, T. J. Hawkins shifted the muzzle of his weapon on its bipod and engaged the sniper. He touched a dial on his scope and the shooter suddenly appeared in the crosshairs of the reticule on his optics.

The man had popped up again after Manning’s burst had tapered off and was attempting to bring a 4-power scope on top of an M-16 A2 to bear on the exposed Americans.

Hawkins found the trigger slack and took it up. He let his breath escape through his nose as he centered the crosshairs on the sniper’s eyes. For a brief strange second, it was as if the two men stared into each other’s eyes. The Iraqi pressed his face into the eyepiece on the assault rifle. The man shifted the barrel as he tried for a shot.

The silenced Mk 11 rocked back against Hawkins’s shoulder. The smoking 7.62 mm shell tumbled out of the ejection port and bounced across the tarpaper-and-gravel roof. In the image of his scope the Iraqi sniper’s left eye became a bloody cavity. The man’s head jerked and a bloody mist appeared behind him as he sagged and fell.

Autofire began hammering the side of the building below Hawkins’s position. He rolled over on his back, snatching up his sniper rifle. He scrambled up, staying low, and crawled through the doorway of the roof access stair. He intended to shift positions and engage from one of the windows overlooking the compound in the building’s top floor.

Below his position McCarter found what he was looking for. He pulled up short and shoved a stiffened forefinger downward, pointing at an enclosed glass skylight that served to open up and illuminate the breakfast area. The opening had appeared as a black rectangle on the images downloaded from the Farm’s Keyhole satellite, and from the first McCarter had seized on the architectural luxury as his means of ingress.

“We have control,” Manning barked, and from half a world away Barbara Price and the Farm’s cyberteam watched from the UAV’s cameras. “We have control,” McCarter repeated.

To create a distraction on the hard entry Gary Manning had prepared explosive charges. Being unable to precisely locate their target before the strike, nonlethal measures had been implemented. Working with Stony Man armorer John “Cowboy” Kissinger, the Canadian demolitions expert had prepped a series of flash-bang charges using stun grenades designed to incapacitate enemy combatants in airplane hangars, factories or warehouses. In addition to the massive SWAT noise-distraction device Manning and Kissinger had layered in several devices from ALS Technologies that contained additional payloads of CS gas.

McCarter slipped into his own SAS model protective mask, then gave Calvin James a thumbs-up signal. “Five, four, three, two, one.”

The ex-SEAL jogged forward and pointed the SPAS-15 at the skylight. The semiautomatic shotgun boomed and eight .38-caliber slugs smashed through the reinforced commercial-grade window.

“Execute, execute, execute!” McCarter ordered.

Instantly, Manning stepped up and threw his satchel charge into the hole. As it plunged through the opening, the entry team turned their backs from the breach, shielding their eyes and ears. Instantly the booming explosion came. Smoke poured out of the opening like the chimney of a volcano.

James spun and stepped up to the ledge before dropping through the hole. He struck the ground and rolled to his left out along the side of his body, absorbing the impact from the ten-foot fall. He came up, the SPAS-15 tracking for a target in the smoke and confusion.

A running body slammed into him, sending them both spinning. Ignoring the combat shotgun on its sling, James reached out with his left hand and tore the AKM from the figure’s grip, tossing it aside as he rolled to his feet. His Beretta appeared in his fist. He pulled the guy closer but didn’t recognize the stunned terrorist and put two 9 mm bullets through his slack-jawed face.

David McCarter dropped down through the breach into chaos.

He saw James drop a body and spin, his pistol up. Around him the whitish clouds of CS gas hung in patches but the interior space was large enough that the dispersal allowed line-of-sight identification.

The Briton was violently thrown into a momentary flashback to his experience in the assault on London’s Iranian embassy after Arab separatists had taken it hostage. He saw a coughing, blinded gunman in an Iraqi police uniform stumble by and shot him at point-blank range with the M-4.

The man was thrown down like a trip-hammered steer in a Chicago stockyard. McCarter went back down to a knee and twisted in a tight circle, muzzle tracking for targets. Behind him a third body dropped like a stone through the skylight breach.

Rafael Encizo landed flat-footed then dropped to a single knee, his fireplug frame absorbing the stress of the ten-foot fall. His MM-1 was secured, muzzle up, tightly against the body armor on his chest and his MP-7 machine pistol was gripped in two hands.

Through the lens of his protective mask Enzcio saw two AKM-wielding men in headdresses and robes stumble past. The Cuban lifted his weapon and pulled the trigger, firing on full automatic from arm’s length. He hosed the men ruthlessly, sending them spinning into each other like comedic actors in a British farce. He turned, saw an Iraqi policeman leveling a folding-stock AKM at him and somersaulted forward, firing as he came up. His rounds cracked the man’s sternum, struck him under the chin and cored out his skull. The corrupt Iraqi dropped to the ground, limbs loose and weapon tumbling.

Gary Manning dropped through the breach, caught himself on the lip of the skylight with his gloved hands and hung for a heartbeat before dropping down. He landed hard with his heavier body weight and went to both knees. He grunted at the impact on his kneepads and orientated himself to the other three Phoenix members, completing their defensive circle as he brought up the cut-down M-60E.

Without orders the team fell into their established enclosed-space clearing pattern. Manning came up and charged toward the nearest wall, clearing left along the perimeter of the room while James followed closely behind him, then turned right. Encizo tucked in behind Manning as he turned left, and McCarter, also charged with coordination, followed James.

Manning kicked a chair out of the way and raced down the left wall of the room. Weapons began firing in the space and he saw muzzle-flashes flare in the swirling CS gas. He passed a dead man hanging by chains from the wall. A close-range gunshot had cracked the bearded man’s skull and splashed his brains on the wall behind his head.

Manning suddenly saw a police officer standing with a pistol, three men with Kalashnikovs in a semicircle in front of him. The Canadian special forces veteran triggered the M-60E in a tight burst, and the 7.62 mm rounds tore the first police bodyguard away as he rushed forward. From behind him Encizo used the MP-7 to cut down the left flank bodyguard before the Iraqi police officer could bring his weapon around.

Manning took two steps forward and shoved the muzzle of his machine gun into the throat of the final bodyguard as Encizo swarmed around him. The Iraqi stumbled backward, at the blunt-tipped spearing movement, his hands dropping his weapon and flying to his throat. As he staggered back, Manning lifted a powerful leg and completed a hard front snap kick into the man’s chest, driving him farther backward and into the police officer.

Both men fell as Encizo reached forward and thrust the muzzle of his smoking-hot machine gun into the coughing and half-blinded Saheed el-Jaga’s face, pinning him to the floor. With his other hand Encizo broke the man’s wrist, sending his pistol sliding away.

Hot shell casings rained down on Encizo as Manning cracked open the bodyguard’s chest with a 5-round burst from the M-60. Blood splashed Saheed el-Jaga’s face as he grimaced in pain, and the stunned and terrified traitor squeezed his eyes tightly shut.

Manning halted his advance and swung the machine gun up to cover them as Encizo flipped the Iraqi over onto his stomach and used a white plastic riot cuff to bind his hands. Saheed el-Jaga screamed in pain as the shattered bones of his wrists were ground against their broken ends by the Phoenix commando’s rough treatment.

A block of light appeared in the gas-choked gloom. A knot of well-armed reinforcements surged through the open door from the outside. Manning shifted on a knee, swinging around the M-60. He saw one of the reinforcements fall, the side of his head vaporizing, then a second fell and Manning realized Hawkins had found his range even at this acute angle.

Manning pulled back on the trigger of his machine gun and the weapon went rock and roll in his grip. He scythed down the confused Iraqi terrorists, cutting into their ranks with his big 7.62 mm slugs. The men screamed and triggered their weapons into the ground as they were knocked backward. He let the recoil against his hand on the pistol grip push the muzzle up, and his rounds cut into the terrorists’ bodies like buzz saws.

“Phoenix, we have company,” Tokaido warned over the team’s earbuds. “Hellfire number two is away. Danger close.”