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“THIRTY SECONDS TO SRB STAGING.”

Something suddenly speared through the sky in the distance, darting across the windshield like a laser-bolt effect from a movie. Schwarz tensed, but the angle was all wrong for something coming after the Arcadia.

“What the hell is going on?” Cole growled.

“Darkest night…” Broome gasped. “Mission control, are you tracking that on radar?”

“We’re trying. It came within twenty-five miles of your course,” Thet said on the other end. “Its trajectory is toward the Caribbean.”

“What is it?” Cole demanded.

Lyons closed his eyes, his jaw set firmly. “It’s the opening shot. This war has reached the hot stage.”

Splintered Sky
Don Pendleton

Stony Man^®

AMERICA’S ULTRA-COVERT INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Special thanks and acknowledgment to Douglas P. Wojtowicz for his contribution to this work.

SPLINTERED SKY

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

PROLOGUE

Near Yuma, Arizona

Sabrina Bertonni winced as she clutched her hand to the bloody gap in her side. The raider’s bullet had merely grazed her, but her clothes were soaked through from what had only been a little nick. Other than keeping her hand clamped over the injury, she didn’t move. The limp bulk of Harold Maguire slumped against her body, casting her in shadow. Maguire’s body shook violently as the raiders emptied more bullets into the group of rocket scientists who had tried to escape out the back of the laboratory.

The men were masked, clad in black from head to toe, wielding automatic weapons that made almost no sound. They moved with a similar eerie silence. Bertonni’s lucidity was hampered by blood loss and the concussion she’d received when her head smacked a rock on the desert floor with the added momentum of Maguire’s corpse, but from the way the assault force moved, it was as if they were living excerpts from her worst nightmares. Their speed and coordination, and just how quietly they had laid waste to the Burgundy Lake Testing Facility gave her the impression of shadows come to life.

Though none of the black-clad raiders had spoken, their goal was clear to Bertonni, especially since she was one of the scientists working on brand-new, high-mobility steering thrusters for precision orbital maneuvering. Compact and fuel-efficient, they would be very important in the next generation of spacecraft replacing the aging, worn-out space shuttle. The maneuvering thrusters would make the expansion of the International Space Station easier, and provide the ability to perform round trips to the moon. Bertonni had no doubt that the thrusters could provide extra maneuverability for combat-oriented suborbital fighters and bombers, or armed satellites. The military potential couldn’t be underestimated. The kind of firepower and professionalism displayed by the armed marauders lent credence to what the enemies of the United States thought of the design.

The security force was provided by the U.S. Air Force, heavily armed and trained soldiers who were responsible for protecting nuclear bomber groups. These men had trained hard against Navy SEAL Opfor units to hone their combat skills and antiinfiltration awareness.

Fat lot of good that did, Bertonni thought. In the distance she heard the blast of C-4 detonating. The ground shook under her, and Maguire’s corpse slid off her prone form. She stirred, looking around. The shadowy raiders were nowhere to be seen, but with their bombs going off, she knew that they weren’t going to stick around. She fished in her pocket for her cell phone and hit Send to 9-1-1. The lighted LED screen showed she had no bars. The remote Burgundy Lake facility had been chosen for its distance from civilization and privacy, but the administrators had set up a cell tower to make things easier for the staff. Bertonni knew that the calls were monitored through that tower, the better to prevent sensitive data from being transmitted outside the testing laboratories, but right now she needed help.

The phone didn’t ring. The raiders had been too efficient, probably taking out the cell tower first.

Bertonni pocketed the phone and crawled, scurrying deeper into the desert, away from the dormitory building. She’d gotten twenty yards when the apartment shook. She looked back to see a cloud of dust and debris swell, escaping through shattered windows and burst doors. The vomitous wave of ejecta hit her hard and knocked her off her feet. Her head swam and she stumbled on the uneven ground. She wrapped her arm around her nose and mouth, filtering out the choking dust with the cloth of her sleeve.

With a kick, she pushed herself forward and struggled to get farther from the building, hugging the ground, trying not be seen by any straggling marauders.

The air popped and crackled with weapons fire, and her instincts threw her flat to the dirt again. The cloud hadn’t dispersed, but someone opened fire into the airborne dust. It was the raiders, and they had to have seen her in the shadows just before the exploding dormitory obscured the scene.

Bertonni crawled, scurrying back toward the destroyed housing, knowing that once the dust settled, she’d be out in the open, an easy target for the brutal gunmen who had visited destruction on the testing facility. When the swirling wisps of the cloud finally dissipated, she was snugged, caked in dust, under the low remnant of a wall. Her breathing slowed, her shoulders tensed as she did her best to impersonate rubble.

A voice cut through the night. “I told you, I saw someone!”

“Fuck it, we’ve got to go. Time’s wasting,” another answered.

“But…”

“Now!” the other ordered. “We won’t be ID’d.” In the distance, she heard large trucks grinding into gear. “You want to walk to Mexico?”

There was a sigh of exasperation and then the sound of running feet.

Cargo trucks grunted and grumbled, rolling away before she could even dare to relax. She sucked in a breath of clean air, exhausted, and light-headed from blood loss.

No one was visible.

Bertonni was safe, for now, but she rolled onto her back, looking at the sky. Stars twinkled above her. She gulped air and looked at the cell phone in her hand.

She had one bar of signal. She thumbed 9-1-1 and hit send.

“Nine-one-one dispatch. What is the nature of your emergency…”

“I’ve been shot. Everyone else is dead. Burgundy Lake Testing Facility,” the woman gasped. “Help me.”

Her strength gave out and her fingers loosened on the phone. She could hear the dispatcher’s voice, tinny through the tiny speaker, and she held on, saying, “I’m awake” every few seconds until she saw the flashing glare of red lights.

CHAPTER ONE

Ten miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border

Hermann Schwarz watched the stars sprayed across the black night as Jack Grimaldi piloted the Hughes 500 NOTAR across the Texan sky. The inky-black background with the glittering field of pinpoints reminded the Able Team electronics genius of one of his lifelong dreams–to soar among the stars. And he had been one of the lucky few who had done just that.

Schwarz’s other lifelong dream was more pedestrian. He wanted to help people. Though he was one-third of one of the world’s most highly experienced and blooded combat teams, the ultimate goal of Able Team wasn’t to engage in bloodshed. It was to protect the citizens of the U.S. Schwarz had been called an assassin by various enemies, but the term “assassin” implied a callous disregard for human life. Certainly, he had a measure of ruthlessness, but it was only displayed against opponents who were demonstrably hostile and violent. While he had no qualms about shooting heavily armed men in the back to end their potential to harm himself, his partners or noncombatants, Schwarz was not murderous.

Killing was just an aspect of his job, just as much as tinkering on new electronic surveillance devices and security countermeasures. Schwarz turned from the starry night sky back to his Combat Personal Data Assistant, a compact little computer that provided the gadgeteer with a suite of powerful tools to make his work easier. He kept the illumination low on the monitor as he scanned the screen. Its powerful satellite modem, akin to the satellite phones, allowed him Internet access even without a WiFi source for miles around, even though a backup transceiver would allow him to piggyback on someone else’s modem if necessary. The CPDA was connected to Stony Man Farm, thousands of miles away in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, allowing him to be plugged into the network run by Aaron Kurtzman and the cyberwizards of his team.

“Hey, Nerd Man.” Carl Lyons spoke up, interrupting Schwarz’s reveries. “You getting this?”

“I am,” Rosario Blancanales announced, answering for his friend. He had a pair of light amplification binoculars scanning out the window. “To the north.”

“Minimal profile on the terrain radar,” Lyons answered. Sitting shotgun in the Little Bird helicopter, his hard blue eyes scanned the screens devoted to the Forward Looking Infrared–FLIR–and Terrain Looking Radar, both keen electronic sensors installed in a bulbous nose projecting from the front of the helicopter’s teardrop shape, lending it the appearance of a porpoise whose snout had been punched off center. “But we’ve got headlights on the FLIR.”

“Low-light headlights,” Blancanales said. “Probably Ultra-violet or IR illumination to make it easier for them to run dark. I didn’t see the vehicles directly, but I saw the ground lit up.”

Schwarz looked to where Blancanales was sweeping the horizon. He ran his stylus over the CPDA, popping open a window that displayed a satellite view of their immediate surroundings.

Lyons turned in his seat and Blancanales leaned over. They all saw, through the IR imaging of a National Reconnaissance Office satellite, a cone of illuminated terrain with tiny stars of light one after another.

“IR beacons so they can follow each other,” Lyons suggested.

“This way only one vehicle has to have its illuminators on, but the others can follow,” Schwarz said. “We got lucky. If you hadn’t seen the ground lit up by IR lights and given Bear a heading, we’d have completely missed them.”

Schwarz’s mind continued to race, analyzing the situation. This night, Able Team was in the air, racing to intercept a smuggling operation that the Farm had heard whispers about. Someone had been monitoring Border Patrol schedules, tailing Jeeps as if looking for holes. This was something more than just a coyote operation snooping for a gap in the defenses. The human smugglers bringing illegals across the border didn’t need to track the USBP’s agents and vehicles, and wouldn’t even dream of tickling their computer system with hacker fingers in cyberspace.

Whatever this operation was about, it wasn’t smuggling illegal immigrants. Able Team had come into conflict at the border several times before, and it could have been anything from a large shipment of drugs to nuclear weapons.

Schwarz’s headset warbled with a beep from his communicator. He keyed the com unit, hearing Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman’s voice in his earphone. He immediately switched it so everyone in the helicopter could hear their support back at the Farm.

“We’ve got a call. Someone hit Burgundy Lake Testing Facility,” the Stony Man cyberwizard said. “Nine-one-one call center got the news five minutes ago. A lone survivor says that the raiders just bugged out.”

“We believe we have their convoy in our sights,” Lyons announced. “And you already know Gadgets has them highlighted on satellite imagery.”

“Affirmative,” Kurtzman returned. “Still creepy how that little box of his keeps him plugged into our network.”

Schwarz smirked. “You know me, I’m five bucks and a nuclear weapon short of controlling the world.”

“Which is why I’ll never pay you back anything you lend me,” Blancanales quipped. “Burgundy Lake, that’s not far from the border, relatively speaking. This has got to be a part of what drew our attention down here.”

“What are they testing there?” Lyons inquired.

Schwarz tapped the CPDA screen a couple of times with his stylus. “They’re on a NASA grant. High-efficiency rocket thrusters.”

“Give the man a cigar,” Kurtzman stated. “You’ll put us out of business with that thing, Gadgets.”

“Nah. I’m just piggybacking on Carmen’s workstation. She pulled up the information a moment before she got it to you,” Schwarz stated.

Kurtzman chuckled. “So you let us do all the work, and you look brilliant.”

Lyons snorted. “It’ll take a lot of work to make Gadgets look anything close to brilliant.”

Schwarz lifted his middle finger to inform Lyons that the Able Team leader was still number one in his book. Lyons grinned and turned to Grimaldi. “Jack, see that wash down there? It’s the only path through these foothills that’ll give the convoy a quick route south. Land us right there. We’ll set up an ambush.”

“Good spot,” Grimaldi mentioned. He grimaced with regret. “Wish this thing had some guns on it.”

“Take off and pull back to an overwatch. We might need a quick pickup, but the convoy could have the firepower to deal with aircraft.”

Grimaldi swung the Little Bird around, depositing Able Team at Lyons’s suggested position. It was several miles ahead of the convoy, but still in their path. The helicopter had been set up for quiet running with engine baffles and sideways projecting speakers that canceled out the racket of the rotor by interrupting the noise with the same sound, aimed back at the rotors at a perpendicular angle. When the two sound sources crossed, they nullified each other, rendering the aircraft no louder than an idling automobile.

There was no doubt that the convoy was up to no good. A line of trucks running on “invisible” headlights and tail beacons at night were the tactics of thieves and smugglers, not of innocents. Burgundy Lake was less than twenty miles north of the border, but directly to the south there was a range of uneven hills without anything more than a goat trail wending through them to cross into Mexico. Schwarz pulled his CPDA from its pocket on his load-bearing vest, checking on the satellite view from above. Something was wrong.

Lyons looked over his shoulder at the small but crystal-clear screen. His big fists clenched and relaxed, tendons popping like firecrackers as his adrenaline kicked into his bloodstream. “They’re operating on strict discipline. The beacons have cut out. It was a refresher flash so that the convoy could maintain its formation. Only the headlights are still running hot.”

“The right place at the right time with the right kind of eyes,” Schwarz mused. “One thing wrong, and they would have gotten away. And we were only here because they were so professional and thorough in their planning and recon, they left enough fingerprints to make us wonder what was going on.”

“Okay,” Lyons said. “We’ve got six vehicles. One truck and several SUVs. They’re running dark and they’ve got radar-absorbent materials rendering them almost invisible. We can also assume they’ve got armor on their rides, and considering the destruction they’ve wreaked, they’re heavily armed and ruthless.”

“Bear, do we have any images of the actual assault?” Blancanales asked over his communicator.

“No,” Kurtzman replied. “We have some NRO satellites looking at the area, but we were looking at the border, not any facilities. I have Hunt and Akira scanning recordings to see if we can see the raiders in action, but nothing yet.”

“This has got to be what drew us down here,” Lyons interjected over his headset. “A hit on Burgundy Lake? Wonder why they didn’t take out the communications.”

“We received a report of a sudden blackout in the facility’s cell tower coverage. It’s still out, but somehow the survivor got a signal,” Kurtzman told him.

“Steel-framed buildings,” Schwarz said. “Usually the steel understructure isn’t preferred because it acts as too good of an antenna, pulling down all manner of interference. However, out in the middle of nowhere, the prefabricated structures are exactly what are needed to set things up on the cheap. If the raiders set explosives and blew up the place, then they undoubtedly left wreckage behind. Our survivor must have huddled among the wreckage, and a remaining girder of the freestanding superstructure formed an impromptu antenna.”

“Wouldn’t be too efficient,” Kurtzman mentioned. “The specific frequency range–”

“All you’d need was at least one bar of signal. The survivor’d be better off with a walkie-talkie,” Schwarz advised, cutting him off. “Shit…Bear, check the satellite imagery from when I first high lit the convoy. I think one’s missing.”

“Checking it,” Kurtzman said. “One beacon has cut out.”

“They’re altering course,” Schwarz told his partners. “Something’s up.”

Lyons ground his teeth in frustration. The trucks were veering back toward the north when he looked over to Schwarz and the dim glow from his CPDA screen. He then turned his gaze skyward, switching his com link to the Stony Man Farm cybernetics crew.

“Bear, check to see if you’re the only ones on the NRO’s party line. The bad guys are changing course, and they might be keyed into the same eyes in the sky.”

“Good instincts, Ironman. How’d you guess?” Kurtzman asked.

“Because we’re the only ones watching them,” Lyons returned.

“One vehicle just dropped off the grid. I can’t even find it by its illuminators,” Schwarz replied. Using a stylus, he dragged the focus of the camera, and stopped. “We’re visible to our own satellite. Damn it…”

Lyons and Blancanales returned to scoping out the darkened landscape, alert that they were literally in the spotlight, the National Reconnaissance Office satellite’s unblinking electronic eye pointing them out to the very force they had used it to spy upon.

“They’ll come in hard and fast, and we’re sitting ducks,” Blancanales replied. “At least in comparison to them.”

“We could call Jack back, but we might only expose him to fire,” Schwarz returned.

“And we’d lose track of the convoy,” Lyons snarled. “No, we get ourselves some wheels and continue the chase.”

Blancanales and Schwarz smiled. When it came to the burly blond ex-cop, the simplest solution was always his choice. There was one vehicle in the area that they could use to chase down and intercept the escaping convoy. The fact that it was filled with heavily armed gunmen was no hindrance in the Ironman’s mind. Lyons had no problem sitting on the gore-soaked bucket seats of an SUV while chasing after high-tech raiders.

Fortunately, the men of Able Team were prepared for a war. The trio had opted for DSA-58 carbines, compact versions of the FN FAL. Normally, the team utilized some form of the M-16 rifle, but with the long ranges and flat terrain of the desert they were in, they went for the 7.62 mm NATO round for the excellent reach it possessed over the 5.56 mm NATO. The smaller, lighter bullets would be blown off course by a stiff desert wind at farther than 500 meters, and at that range, a reliable kill was an iffy proposition. For the FAL, it was child’s play to cause a lethal injury at twice that distance.

The American-made FALs were supplemented by Smith & Wesson Military and Police pistols. The M&Ps were sixteen-shot, .40-caliber autoloaders in a package no larger than a 1911. Attached to Picatinny rails under the pistols’ barrels were white light and laser aiming modules, as much for recoil control as for illumination purposes. Able Team had chosen a proved border-fighting load, the 165-grain jacketed hollowpoint round, as accurate and powerful as a .357 Magnum round out to one hundred yards. The trio opted to leave the suppressors off the thread-barreled handguns, not needing stealth at the cost of increased range. Blancanales had added an M-203 grenade launcher to the forearm of his DSA-58 carbine, while Lyons wore a Mossberg 500 Cruiser pistol-grip pump shotgun in a sheath on his back. The Cruiser had no shoulder stock, but the big ex-cop had a Knox Comp-Stock installed, as well as a stabilizing single-point sling. Schwarz’s extra load had been taken up by his various electronics gear.

Lyons changed out the dutch-load of shot and slugs to go completely to Brenneke slugs, which turned the compact scattergun into a large-bore rifle spitting out devastating .72-inch slugs. Anyone coming at them would catch a face full of big bullets that hit hard.

Even though Able Team knew that a single vehicle had broken off to break their ambush, it still came as a surprise when they heard the warbling whistle of a 40 mm grenade arcing through the sky.

“Cover!” Lyons bellowed, throwing himself into a rut on the uneven ground.

Schwarz dropped behind a berm that rippled up at the base of a foothill instants before the world broke apart around him. Six and a half ounces of high explosive detonated only a few yards away, the lethal concussion wave and shrapnel deflecting off the small slope. No jagged bits of segmented wire tore through his flesh, but the powerful ripples of force coming off the detonation expanded, rolling into him.

The stars above swirled chaotically as he struggled to retain consciousness.

CHAPTER TWO

Carl Lyons saw Schwarz flop on the ground in reaction to the grenade detonation and cursed under his breath.

“Pol! Gadgets is hit,” he hissed into his throat mike. “Cover him.”

“One sec,” Blancanales responded. His own 40 mm launcher popped off a shell. Instead of returning fire, it threw an M-583 parachute flare into the sky. Burning at 90,000 candlepower, it lit up the general area where the enemy grenade had come from, illuminating a spot two hundred yards in diameter with night vision–frying light. Even bare, night-attuned eyes would have trouble adapting immediately to the sudden blaze of white light slashing a hole in the dark.

Lyons spotted two gunners flinch from the sudden brightness, and brought up his FAL carbine, triggering a burst of high-powered rifle slugs at them across the distance. One of the enemy shooters jerked violently, crushed by the devastating 7.62 mm NATO bullets shredding through body armor and churning up vital organs. The other ducked quickly toward the cover of the uneven ground at roadside. Beyond the 650-foot circle of light descending from the parachute flare, with his DSA-58’s muzzle-blast dampened by an efficient flash hider, the Able Team leader had the opportunity to chase the enemy gunman with another burst as wild rounds snapped randomly through the darkness.

The enemy gunmen hadn’t been ready for their night game to be cast in a high-definition 90,000-candlepower spotlight, and only seven seconds had passed in the 40-second burn of the parachute flare. Through the holographic reflex sight, Lyons picked up a third rifleman who exposed only a small portion of his head and shoulders around the side of a big rock. The sight was a quick reaction design, and didn’t provide an increase of magnification, just a tiny, projected red dot in the middle of a glass screen that gave the big ex-cop a faster focus point. The projected red dot obscured the enemy shooter’s head and shoulders, and Lyons milked the trigger. At 650 rounds per minute, the carbine chewed out a blistering salvo of bullets that spat dirt and stone splinters up in a cloud.

Another 40 mm grenade sizzled through the sky, and Lyons glanced back to Blancanales and Schwarz.

The electronics genius had recovered his senses, but Blancanales had instinctively hooked his arm under Schwarz’s and yanked him along. Lyons bellowed, equalizing the pressure in his ears as he stuffed himself into the bottom of a gully beside the goat path.

The darkened desert shook with a thunderbolt strike, and Lyons could feel his load-bearing vest ripple as the concussion burst swept across him. Blancanales’s grenade launcher burped again while Schwarz’s own DSA-58 carbine snarled a vengeful response. This time, the Puerto Rican Able Team veteran popped off an M379-A1 Airburst grenade. Instead of providing a miniature sun dangling from a parachute, the Airburst shell looped into an arc, landed on the ground and a black powder charge propelled the main grenade five feet into the air before its fuse wound down to detonation. At a height of five feet off the ground, the Airburst exploded, spraying out a sheet of lethal shrapnel that would kill anything within a sixteen-foot radius of the blast, but still could wound as far out as four hundred feet.

A wailing scream of pain as shrapnel tore through body armor and fragile flash and bone beneath provided the testimony to its effectiveness. Lyons spotted the gunman who had dodged his initial burst, clutching his shredded face and neck. He’d lost his weapon when Blancanales’s shrapnel had scythed across him, and Lyons was about to put a few mercy rounds into the gunman when Schwarz nailed him.

“Can you run?” Lyons asked over the headset.

“Yeah,” Schwarz replied. “The concussion wave only knocked the wind out of me.”

“We’ve lost the element of surprise.” Blancanales spoke up, pointing to the flare as it sputtered through the last of its forty-second lifespan, burning down to a lifeless ember that flopped under its parachute on the ground. “That baby was seen for miles.”

“I saw their truck,” Lyons told him. “It did its job. Gadgets…”

“I’ll get Jack on station,” Schwarz returned.

The trio raced across the desert, wary that they might not have finished off all of their opponents.

Charging up the goat path to the SUV took only another half minute. Lyons paused at roadside for a heartbeat to pop off a single round into a sprawled corpse to ensure it would never rise again. He noted with grim humor that Schwarz had been the one to nail the enemy gunman wielding the grenade launcher.

The enemy’s SUV had a guard with a compact machine pistol. The man rushed to get back behind the wheel of his vehicle, firing across the hood, but Lyons and Blancanales stitched him with twin bursts of autofire. Blown nearly out of his boots, the guard’s corpse flopped in a boneless mass, door wide open.

Blancanales checked the dead man and peeled the night-vision goggles off his face.

“Keys are in the ignition,” Lyons announced, crawling into the SUV’s shotgun seat.

“Good,” the Able Team commando replied. He slipped behind the wheel, fired up the engine and spun out.

Schwarz was in the back, picking up the FLIR camera feed from Grimaldi’s helicopter, correlating the image with his GPS data. “They’re looping around, going for a second run at the border. They’re either certain their boys did the job, or they’re going to come in hot and heavy.”

“I’m not going to wait to see what their response is,” Lyons said. He wedged his Mossberg shotgun into the seat well and rolled down the window, providing himself with room to shoot his carbine with its stock folded. “Nut up and do it.”

“It’s worked this long,” Schwarz agreed.

Blancanales nodded. He could see the beacons on the enemy convoy blink out, their headlights flaring to life in an effort to blind him, but they were so far away, and the wily Able Team expert was so familiar with low-light operations, he avoided any discomfort. Turning his head to observe the cast-off infrared illumination instead of staring into the “invisible” light sources directly with his NVGs, he was able to keep his course to intercept the enemy trucks.

Lyons had traded his carbine with Blancanales and stuffed an M-433 HEDP shell into its grenade launcher. The SUV jostled him, rocking hard in an effort to throw his aim off, but Lyons had earned the name Ironman due to his phenomenal strength. He’d braced himself in the passenger seat, pointed at a raider’s SUV and touched off the grenade. The high-explosive, dual-purpose shell spiraled toward the enemy vehicle at 350 feet per second, smashing into the grille of the onrushing Jeep. The M-433 exploded, a spit-back assembly built into the shell focusing a blistering-hot jet of molten copper, propelled by several ounces of A5 explosive through the engine block and into the cab of the SUV. The raiders’ driver and shotgun man were killed as the dashboard, speared by liquid metal and high explosives, turned to a mass of jagged, burning fragments that tore through their chests, legs and faces. Driverless, the enemy Jeep swerved into a rut and somersaulted in the air before it could bleed off speed. The men in the back seat, merely wounded by the cone of deadly shrapnel that used to be their ride, screamed for a moment before the airborne SUV slammed, roof-first into the Texas desert. The SUV had been designed to handle roll-overs, but no maker could have predicted their vehicle would be lifted up and hurled at the ground like a toy. The survivors’ screams cut off instantly as their bodies were compressed to ground beef under three-quarters of a ton of off-roading metal.

The remaining three escorts for the big trucks swung out, gunners ripping off streams of autofire. Schwarz had targeted one of the Suburbans as they swung parallel to Able Team for a moment, his hammering carbine carving a bloody swathe through the open windows that the enemy gunners fired from. The vehicle that Schwarz raked swung wildly off course, a lifeless body flopping half in and out of the window he’d used as a turret. Schwarz, a veteran of countless gun battles inside of a vehicle, had known to tuck himself low, using the window-reinforced door as his shield, rather than expose his head and shoulders in an effort to utilize the opening as a turret.

Blancanales swung the front of Able Team’s captured Suburban on an intercept course for a second of the raiders’ vehicles, giving the wheel a jerk at the last moment to stab the corner of the front fender into the rear wheel of the passing enemy. The fender deformed on Able Team’s ride, but the rear axle of the hostile Suburban snapped like a twig under the force of the SUV hammering into it. The mysterious marauders wailed in dismay as their truck spiraled through the desert, back wheels flying off.

“Last one’s keeping its distance,” Lyons noted. “I’m only getting glancing shots on it. Their driver’s good.”

“Forget him for now,” Blancanales snapped. “We’ve got the main trucks to deal with.”

Lyons glanced back at the pair of trucks. They were two-and-a-half-ton M35 trucks, and they were lumbering toward the goat path as fast as they could roll, taking advantage of the distraction provided by their escorts. The Able Team leader sneered and pushed home another M-433, then remembered the possibility that the marauders had taken captives.

Rather than risk noncombatants, he pulled his Mossberg Cruiser 500. The Brenneke slug load would be devastating in close quarters, and not as risky as buckshot to bystanders. “Swing up close on the lead truck. If we can stop it while we’ve taken up the roadside…”

“Good plan,” Blancanales agreed, and he gunned the engine, zooming past the second transport truck. Schwarz scanned the back, but could only see black-clad troopers in the shadows of the canvas tarp.

Blancanales swerved between the two big M35s, putting the passenger side in close contact with the tailgate of the lead vehicle. Lyons threw open the door and launched himself from the shotgun seat, his Mossberg gripped tightly in his right fist. His beefy left hand wrapped around the top of the tailgate, and he hauled himself up as his partners veered away. Swinging over into the tarp-covered bed, he spotted a quartet of gun-toting men surrounding a pair of crates. In the corner, a coverall-wearing man, his head bleeding from blunt trauma, curled up.

Lyons evaluated the scene in half the time it took for the gunmen to react to his bulk surging over the top of the tailgate. The Knox pistol-grip Comp Stock gave the Able Team leader all the leverage he needed to swing up the Mossberg Cruiser 500 like a handgun and fire a single 12-gauge slug through the chest of the closest gunman. A .72-inch missile ripped through the raider’s breastbone, reducing it to free-floating splinters as the solid hunk of lead tore his heart from its arteries like a miniature bulldozer.

Lyons immediately shifted his aim and stabbed the next of the armor-clad raiders in the breastbone with the point of his Cruiser 500. Since Lyons had John “Cowboy” Kissinger modify the muzzle of the weapon with a Tromix Shark Brake Door Breacher, and, given his awesome strength, the shotgun became a spike-toothed spear that made ribs crunch even through body armor. The hapless enemy grabbed the shotgun instinctively, bracing the slide. Lyons thanked his opponent for playing into his hands by quickly wrenching the Cruiser 500 back and forth, his foe’s grasp enabling him to pump the shotgun one-handed. A second solid 12-gauge slug exploded from the muzzle, tearing into the bruised sternum of the marauder and exploding out of his spine. The shooter behind him was bobbing and weaving, trying to get an angle on the burly killing machine attached to the tailgate when the Brenneke slug sliced across his biceps and glanced across his ribs.

This time, the gunman’s body armor protected him, if only because the deadly slug had been slowed down by the armor and torso of another person. The impact still threw the guy off balance and he let go of his grip on his rifle, one hand tearing through the canvas cover in an attempt to get an anchor to remain standing. Unfortunately for the raider, the force needed to tear through the tarpaulin had shattered several of his fingers, and with only one digit to maintain a hold, the next jolt of the truck sent him reeling across the crates in the middle of the bed.

Lyons’s legs and support arm surged with power and he hurled himself over the tailgate. He somersaulted to cushion his landing on the bed where the injured raider had fallen. As the enemy shooter struggled to bring up his rifle singlehanded, Lyons foiled his efforts at self-defense by spiking both of his heels down into the murderous marauder’s chest. Aching ribs snapped under the ferocious power of the Able Team leader’s devastating kicks, and the gunman’s mouth became a crimson volcano of burbling blood and bile.

Lyons took the opportunity to rack the action of his Mossberg with his now free left hand, just in time to see the head of the last of the hostiles in the truck poke up.

“Don’t do it!” the raider shouted. “I’ll kill—”

Lyons pulled the trigger on the shooter before he could even complete, let alone make good on his threat to shoot the cowering figure in coveralls sharing the carnal pit. One and three-eighths ounces of rifled lead struck the loudmouth between his eyes and popped his skull like a balloon filled with gray gelatin. It was a vicious, ruthless action, but the Able Team leader knew that the black-clad gunman wouldn’t have worried about shooting either Lyons or the helpless hostage. He got to his feet and moved over to the bloody-faced man in the corner, clicking on a pocket flashlight to get some intel on who the victim was.

“Who are you?” the balding hostage asked. Just beneath his high hairline was an oval-shaped section of livid skin. Lyons recognized the injury as caused by the steel tubular butt stock of an M-4 assault rifle, just like the black-clad gunmen were wearing. He gripped the man by the chin and checked his eyes.

The pupils dilated as the flashlight’s glare stabbed into them, so the head trauma was only superficial, torn skin seeping blood from a glancing impact. Lyons was glad for that, because he wasn’t in the best position to deal with a victim suffering from a major concussion or slipping into shock.

“I’m a friend,” Lyons answered. “Stay here and curl up. We’re going to make certain you are safe.”

“Where are you going?” the man, Leon Paczesny according to his Burgundy Lake Testing Facility identification badge, asked.

“Truck’s still moving. I’m going to schedule a stop to let you off,” Lyons told him. He returned the Mossberg to its sheath on his back and pulled the Smith & Wesson MP-40 from its holster. “Sit tight, literally.”

Paczesny nodded, tucking his knees up to his chest and resting his bloodied forehead between them. Lyons unsheathed his combat knife and sliced an exit hole through the canvas. He climbed through the tarp and grabbed onto the back of the cab.

Able Team’s captured Chevy Suburban was at Lyons’s side, Schwarz firing his DSA carbine through the back window of the armored raider vehicle at the two remaining enemy SUVs which were struggling to keep up with the racing convoy. Lyons grimaced as he heard the rip-snap of the FAL’s high-velocity rifle bullets spearing through the darkness. By now, all pretense of stealth had disappeared, and the Burgundy Lake raiders had switched on conventional headlights. Lyons stiff-armed his MP-40 and fired a volley as fast as he could work the trigger, six 165-grain jacketed hollowpoint rounds striking the windshield behind a pair of enemy headlights. The Able Team commander focused his fire on the Suburbans, not certain if the other truck had a hostage, as well.

Safety glass deformed and whitened under Lyons’s barrage, shocking the driver into slamming on the brakes. The second Chevy flashed forward to take up the slack, but its hood smoked, pouring out thick clouds from where its shattered radiator and shot-up V-8 burned. The fact that the Suburban continued to rattle onward to keep up with the rolling battle despite a magazine of .30-caliber bullets in it was testament the truck’s engineering. Unfortunately, no amount of SUV design excellence could have provided the raiders with protection from a 40 mm buckshot grenade.

Firing the equivalent of three 12-gauge shotgun shells’ worth of number 4 buck, the M-576 turned Blancanales’s M-203 into a supershotgun. At maximum dispersal, the M-203 could put out a cone of death almost one hundred feet wide. At the range between Schwarz in the back of Able Team’s Suburban to the enemy vehicle, the spread only ensured that a seven-foot diameter hose of death collapsed the windshield and perforated the surviving gunmen in the Jeep.

The smoldering vehicle rolled on, glancing off the fender of the second M-35 cargo truck before rebounding into a ditch. As tortured steel collapsed under its own inertia, gasoline squeezed out of severed fuel lines and turned into a blossom of fire licking into the night sky.

Lyons returned his attention to the cab, only to see the shotgun rider of the lead two-and-a-half-ton truck climbing out the passenger door, a Glock in hand. Lyons swept the MP-40 back toward him and triggered a pair of slugs. The bouncing truck was too much for Lyons to maintain his aim, so the bullets went high and to the right. Only one wide-mouthed round clipped the enemy gunman’s shoulder, gouging a deep laceration through the muscle. The impact was still enough to throw the raider’s aim off, his Glock punching holes through the roof of the cab. A sudden spray of blood darkened the driver window, and the M-36 cargo truck lurched violently. Lyons tightened his grasp on the iron rib holding up the tarp, and though his feet left the thin ledge he was using as a running board, he wasn’t thrown from the vehicle.

“Hang on!” Lyons bellowed to Paczesny. “We’re going to crash!”

The truck swerved off the road and Lyons twisted, hurling his Smith & Wesson into the bed and using both hands to haul him through the tear in the canvas. He tucked his legs up and behind him just as the two-and-a-half-ton truck lurched and skidded onto its side. The steel ribs held as Lyons flopped against the bottom of the seats. The packing crates shattered, spilling prototype motors onto the canvas where shredding tarpaulin snagged them and ground them to useless metal splinters under the cover’s ribbing.

Lyons looked around for Paczesny and saw the balding, bloody-headed man holding his Smith & Wesson.

“Had to go and fuck up everything didn’t you, Blondie?” Paczesny snarled, jabbing the pistol toward Lyons. The faux hostage took in a breath, but Lyons straightened his legs, using the bench he laid on as a launch pad, slamming into the gun-toting fake and knocking them both out the back of the sliding truck. The pair hit the ground, tumbling, MP-40 flying clear of stunned fingers as the second two-and-a-half-ton truck whirled past, missing them by inches.

Paczesny’s fists rained on the Able Team leader’s neck and shoulders in a futile attempt to dislodge Lyons. Without leverage, the blows were merely annoying, and Lyons whipped his forehead forward, striking the balding man’s nose at the bridge, hard enough to make him see stars under the impact without doing any fatal damage. Lyons needed this man for information. Grabbing Paczesny’s wrist, Lyons twisted. The pop of joints was accompanied by a wail of pain.

“Are there any hostages in the other truck?” Lyons bellowed.

“Piss off!” Paczesny answered.

Lyons twisted even harder, and he could see the knob of his prisoner’s ulna stretching the skin of his elbow. “Wrong answer. I’ll rip this fucking thing off and feed it to you if you don’t answer.”

“No. No. I was the only one with them,” Paczesny said.

“How’d you get the stock burn?” Lyons asked.

“Air Force guard gave me a whack in the head when I pulled a gun on him. My partners burned him down,” Paczesny said.

Confronted by the balding man’s betrayal, Lyons gave a hard final twist, then punched him in the temple. The blow rendered Paczesny unconscious, and Lyons secured his wrists and ankles with cable ties. “You two get that? No friendlies are on truck two. Free fire!”

“We’ve got it,” Schwarz answered. “Let me just take care of this.”

Hundreds of yards away, Schwarz fed another magazine into his DSA-58 tactical carbine and hammered off another burst through a pursuing Suburban. Finally, despite the unstable platform of his own ride and the uneven road, he was able to score a direct hit with the autorifle. Schwarz’s burst struck the enemy driver in the head and exploded his brains. The shotgun rider lunged, grabbing the wheel, but the vehicle fell back without any pressure on the gas.

Schwarz had an easier time aiming at the stilled SUV full of gunmen, burning off the rest of his 30-round magazine into the cab. One of the enemy raiders was leaning out the window, returning fire with his M-4 carbine, but his efforts were cut off by the Able Team genius’s slashing storm of high-velocity bullets. The vehicle was out of the play.

“Okay, the last of the escorts are done,” Schwarz called. “Wish you were here for this.”

“Just do it,” Lyons growled over the com link.

Schwarz fed another HEDP round into the M-203’s breech and aimed at the second M36. He pulled the trigger and the 40 mm armor-piercing round hit the grille and detonated. A small gust of flaming gases appeared around the nose of the cargo truck, a display of the impact point as the real light show went on inside of the engine compartment. The shaped charge liquefied the interior cone of copper and turned it into a flaming bullet that shredded the engine block. The twelve-cylinder motor disintegrated into a wave of shrapnel that obliterated the bellies and legs of the driver and the passenger, killing them instantly.

The vehicle skidded to a halt, kicking up dirt as it slid sideways. Blancanales hit the brakes, and the two Able Team commandos got out of the captured SUV using it as a shield.

“I’ve got movement,” Blancanales announced. He opened fire at a fleeing shadow, but the enemy figure was just too fast. He disappeared into the rough, broken face of a cliff. “Ironman, try to cut him off.”

“You’re too far down, and I don’t have a shot,” Lyons replied. “More movement at the back of your truck…”

Blancanales and Schwarz saw three black-clad marauders exit the rear of the truck, their weapons up and spitting fire, but the two Able Team operatives were ready for them. Their rifles vomited hot lead, dumping the hard men into the dirt.

Blananales returned to looking for the mystery shadow, launching another parachute flare, but the uneven ground had too many shadows, nooks and crannies for a determined fleeing opponent. The fact that he hadn’t returned fire was indicative that their foe was not interested in a fight.

“We’ll find him,” Schwarz promised. “Whoever set this up has something planned.”

Blancanales nodded as the parachute flare sputtered and burned out. In moments, it was as cold as the trail looked.