War Tactic

by Don Pendleton

  “Many kilometers?” James repeated.

  “He sounds like he’s reading off cue cards,” Grimaldi put in.

  “I’m calling the Farm again,” McCarter said. “Something’s damn fishy here, and we’re going to get to the bottom of it if we have to swim back out there.”

  McCarter clenched his fists. This wasn’t over. Not even slightly. He checked his chronometer. “Get the Filipino navy on the horn, Jack,” he said. “Like it or not, we’re going to need their cooperation. We need radar fix on that ship to verify they don’t leave. And we’re going to need more naval support to get out there and do what we’ve got to do the hard way.”

  The Sikorsky thundered on toward Puerto Galera.

  “It’s going to be tight, David,” James said.

  “We don’t have much daylight left,” McCarter agreed, nodding, “but maybe we can use that to our advantage. A lot is going to depend on what the locals can help us do.”

  “You think they’ll bite?” James asked.

  “Let’s say I’m hoping Hal is as persuasive as I think he is,” McCarter said.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Hilton Head Island

  Hilton Head Island was a resort town named for one William Hilton, who in 1663 was modest enough to name after himself the headland adjacent to Port Royal Sound’s entrance. With twelve miles of beach fronting the Atlantic, the island saw millions of visitors and well more than a billion dollars in tourist money. While it was easy to dismiss the entire area as one big resort, home to a handful of wealthy residents and the seasonal tourist glut, the city did have a small industrial area not far from the Hilton Head airport.

  It was this complex to which Able Team was headed. The island, fortunately, was accessible using Route 278, which followed a series of bridges connecting the island to South Carolina. Schwarz looked up from his candy monster game long enough to acknowledge the Pinckney Island National Wildlife Refuge, which their bridge carried them through at the fringes before they entered Hilton Head itself.

  They passed several gated communities on their way to their destination. The season was on and the tourist trade was brisk. Lyons wasn’t happy about that. He would have preferred they roll through this town when it was the least popular place on the planet. There would be fewer innocent people to get in the way of a bullet, that way.

  Fortunately, though, the property the Farm had sleuthed out and identified as one of Rhemsen’s holdings looked largely deserted. With luck, that would mean there wouldn’t be any civilian employees wandering around. The fact that they hadn’t encountered many of these in their previous raids on Rhemsen’s properties just proved that Rhemsen was making some kind of move, some kind of transition from legitimate business—if his business had ever been truly legitimate—to whatever he was doing that made it okay, in his mind, to start killing federal agents.

  As business plans went, it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to Lyons. They had seen enough of these nut jobs over the years that nothing truly surprised him, of course, but he liked to think that on some level he understood why a man went bad. Every one of these bastards, all the villains and terrorists and crazed, power-mad lunatics they came up against, had some plan, something they were trying to accomplish. Sure, sometimes that made about as much sense as a screen door in a submarine, like that death cult operating out of Germany a few years back. Terrorists he understood. Rich guys like Rhemsen trying to make a buck, even through treason and reckless arms sales to foreign powers, he could at least grasp. Money was a powerful motivator. But killing just because you wanted the world to die? That was nutty stuff.

  So where did Rhemsen fall on that spectrum? As Lyons drove, he considered what they knew. The guy’s background checked out. He’d grown up a privileged orphan after his parents died young. Educated in Oxford. There was something in his file about an accident during his college years that might explain why his face looked so odd. It wasn’t detailed in his file, but the Farm had dug up some records relating to a hospital stay during that period.

  That might explain why Rhemsen’s face looked like twenty miles of bad gravel road that had been smoothed over with cold patch. Lyons’s first assumption had been just vanity. You saw enough of those Hollywood guys who went under the knife too many times and ended up looking like old English ladies with missing eyebrows.

  Driving here, Blancanales had raised the question of whether they should call in the cavalry, have the National Guard roust the joint. The problem was no longer one of having sufficient legal recourse to bring in Rhemsen. Lyons had even placed a call to the Farm to make sure, checking with Price to see if maybe there was a flaw in his logic. She had confirmed what he already expected, though.

  Already, an entire building on American soil had been blown up. While civilian casualties had been zero domestically over the course of Able Teams’ operations against RhemCorp—the only dead men had been members of the Blackstar goon squad, who had all been engaged in trying to murder federal agents—this was the sort of thing that made the Feds nervous. Brognola hadn’t mentioned it during their initial briefing, concerned as he was about the South China Sea angle, but Lyons had been a cop for most of his life in one form or another. Arguably, he still was, even though he had traded his job in law enforcement for one in counterterrorism.

  People were all up in arms these days about the militarization of police. He got that. The tactics in which Able Team and Phoenix Force traded were by definition extralegal. It wouldn’t do for too many people to discover just how the Farm got things done, because working outside the law made lots of people, from civilians to politicians, nervous. That was why it was necessary for the Special Operations Group to work covertly, as it did.

  The RhemCorp site was separated from the main road by a winding drive lined with carefully landscaped trees. Lyons was careful, as he guided the truck along that drive, to watch for Blackstar men in hiding. He scanned the roadside with a practiced eye. A lot of American soldiers had returned from Iraq and Afghanistan with a healthy fear of debris by the roadside. Lyons, veteran at counterterrorism that he was, had started his career as a cop, but the idea was the same…and the dangers were also the same.

  The Blackstar security forces had showed absolutely no hesitation when it came to trying to murder federal agents. They would not be above rigging roadside explosives to take out intruders. He wondered if they might have gone so far as to line the drive with mines, or anything exotic like that, but it seemed unlikely, as vehicles would pass in and out of the property on a regular basis if that property was active. Still, there was no guarantee.

  That was the thing about power-mad, greedy, reckless murderers. They were a little on the unpredictable side.

  The whole thing struck him as weird, for an arms-manufacturing facility to be hidden away in such a posh resort area as Hilton Head. He was pretty sure they had passed some gated communities along the way that housed some fairly well-known celebrities. It wasn’t something he would mention in front of Schwarz, though. He didn’t feel like enduring the near-endless enjoyment Schwarz would get from making fun of Lyons’s unexpected pop-culture knowledge. That was the electronics expert’s territory, after all.

  “What are you grinning about, Ironman?” Schwarz asked.

  “Nothing,” said Lyons.

  “It’s never nothing when you say it that way,” Schwarz said.

  “Shut up, Gadgets,” Lyons said pleasantly.

  “Okay, now I know something’s up.”

  “How does that work?” Blancanales put in. “All he said was ‘shut up.’ He’s always telling you to shut up.”

  “And he never listens,” Lyons said.

  Schwarz raised a finger. “Over the years I have become something of a connoisseur of Carl’s ‘shut ups,’” he said. “Like a fine wine, each one has a subtle bouquet, multiple layers of meaning suspended in—”

  “No, seriously, Gadgets,” Lyons interrupted. “Shut up.” He pointed. “Something feels wrong.”
>
  The nose of the Suburban was now at the edge of a small parking area around the Hilton Head RhemCorp building. There was no external signage, nothing to indicate what this building was or to whom it belonged. If it had taken so long for the Farm to sleuth out this particular location, that probably meant there was juicy stuff hidden here. Or that there had been. You never knew, with these joints.

  Schwarz paused, his jovial demeanor evaporating. “Yeah,” he said.

  “You feeling it?” Lyons asked.

  “Yeah,” Schwarz answered.

  “Me, too,” Blancanales said.

  “Grab the duffel,” Lyons directed as he surveyed the lot. There were plenty of cars here. The facility wasn’t empty. There were bound to be people working here and they would have to sift through these to determine who were civilians and who were shooters. Anybody in a Blackstar uniform had better lie down the moment Able Team hit those front doors, though, or Lyons was going to consider them fair game. He had been shot at enough by these goons. And he was really, really hoping to get his hands on Jason Fitzpatrick.

  That big bastard had a beat-down coming. That much, Lyons was sure of. Something about the whole setup here, though, was eating at him. It was ticking at the back of his mind, making him question everything. The nagging itch continued as he took his shotgun from the duffel, slung his war bag over his shoulder and made sure that he had enough loaded drum magazines for the weapon. His partners armed up, too.

  “No guards,” Schwarz said.

  “No guards!” Lyons said. “That’s what it is. Every other facility we’ve come up against has been guarded to hell and gone, full of Blackstars with itchy trigger fingers.” He swept the parking lot with his big hand. “There are just as many cars parked here. There should be just as big a presence.”

  “Maybe they’re watching us from inside,” Blancanales ventured.

  “I don’t see any cameras,” Schwarz said. “Nothing moving at the windows, either.”

  “I don’t like it,” said Lyons. “We should see something. There should be more activity.”

  Lyons marked the path they would have to walk, through the thickest of the parked cars, to the front door of the building. That’s when he saw it. He cursed himself for a fool. It should have been obvious from the moment they’d pulled up.

  “Every one of these cars is a beater,” Schwarz noted, apparently hitting the conclusion the same moment Lyons froze in his tracks. “Not a brand-new car among them. Not one.”

  Lyons’s eyes went to the wheels of the nearest cars and then to the space between them. The cable snaking underneath the vehicles, connecting each one to the next, was the same color as the asphalt beneath. He very nearly missed it.

  “Ironman—” Schwarz started to say.

  “Run!” Lyons roared. He grabbed Schwarz by the collar and Blancanales by the shoulder, shoving them both ahead of him, propelling them forward. The men of Able Team managed to clear the parking lot kill zone just in time.

  Lyons felt it before he heard it. There was a rush of air, almost as though the space around him was being sucked past through a giant vacuum. His ears popped. A wave of heat, pressing against him like the palm of an angry war god, shoved him toward Schwarz and Blancanales, dumping him on top of both men, toppling all three. They landed just short of the steps to the front door of the building.

  The explosion was powerful enough to blow out the glass on the ground floor of the building. It shattered the panes of the front doors and dropped countless pebbles of safety glass on Able Team. Lyons could feel his exposed skin burning. He expressed himself as loudly and with as much profanity as he could manage.

  “That’s telling them, Ironman,” Blancanales muttered from underneath him.

  “Carl…” Schwarz said. “You’re crushing my spine.”

  Lyons rolled off and into a kneeling stance. He brought the shotgun up just in time. Uniformed Blackstar security personnel were now appearing at the shattered front doors, their AR-pattern rifles swinging Able Team’s way.

  “Oh, hell, no,” Lyons said, holding back the trigger of the USAS-12.

  He rode out the recoil, spraying 00 shot and slugs in combination, feeling the mighty shotgun buck and tremble in his fists. The men at the doorway, standing elevated as they were compared to his position, were blown apart at the shins, their legs ripped into bloody stumps. The screaming was inhuman. Lyons kept firing, emptying his drum, making sure that if anyone was coming behind that first wave, they, too, would be knocked down for the count.

  The sharp reports of Blancanales’s M-4 were punctuated by the lighter chatter of Schwarz’s Colt SMG. The Colt subgun had a tremendously high rate of fire. Schwarz stitched his way through the ranks of the enemy wounded, giving them mercy shots to end their suffering.

  Lyons could hear ringing in his ears and smell the discharge from their weapons. He paused, shucking the last drum and slamming home a replacement from his war bag. Jacking in the first round, he looked at Schwarz and Blancanales. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s clean house.”

  They strode up the steps with Lyons at the tip of a wedge formation. Schwarz and Blancanales covered his flanks. Each man was responsible for his side of guarding their six o’clock. Ready for any amount of firepower—at least, that was how Carl Lyons felt—the three counterterrorists entered the previously masked RhemCorp building.

  The foyer was pocked with holes from their weapons fire. That wasn’t what caught Lyons’s practiced eye, though. The very first thing he noticed was how terrible the walls had looked before they were covered in bullet holes.

  “This place was deserted,” Schwarz said. “Look at how much dust is still in the corners of the window frames on either side of the door.”

  “Could they have reactivated the place by coincidence?” Blancanales offered. “Put it back into service for some purpose?”

  “Just before we find it?” Lyons said. “Not likely. And those rigged junkers in the parking lot…? That’s not a security measure. That’s a trap. They were laying for us.”

  “Us specifically?” Schwarz asked.

  “I’d put money on it,” Lyons said. “Watch your backs. And keep a sharp eye out for more explosives. We know Rhemsen has a thing for rigging his buildings. I don’t want to go up with this joint.”

  “Split up?” Schwarz asked.

  “Not this time,” Lyons said. “I’m not making it that much easier for them. We stay in formation. Cover each other’s backs. Be ready for anything.”

  “Left or right?” Schwarz said. There were exit fire doors on either end of the foyer.

  “Left,” said Lyons. He very carefully tried the door handle. It was locked. There was no way to check to see if the door itself was wired. He backed up and brought up his leg.

  “Wait,” Schwarz said. “Let me.” He took out one of the plastic-explosive poppers still in the duffel Blancanales had thrown over his shoulder. This he affixed to the door. All three men backed up once the button was pushed.

  The door exploded. There was nothing larger to indicate an explosive surprise on the other side.

  Lyons went forward, low, while his partners covered the sides of the door. Over the iron sights of the USAS-12, Lyons crept across the threshold, waiting for bullets that might come at any moment.

  The adjoining room was some kind of office area. The cubicles were permanent parts of the structure, faced with drywall and most likely framed with wood beneath. The desks were covered in dust. There was computer equipment on some of them, but the units were ancient.

  “This is a 286 with dual three-and-a-half and five-and-a-quarter drives,” Schwarz said, pointing to one. “I haven’t seen one of those in years.”

  “We’re not collecting souvenirs,” Lyons said.

  “This is a piece of IT history, Carl,” Schwarz argued.

  “I’ve got five bucks that says we just blow everything up before we leave,” Blancanales said.

  “I’m not taking that bet,” Schwarz said
, now sounding somewhat gloomy.

  “You’re not taking any bets until you pay me what you owe me,” Lyons said as he reached the exit door. This, too, was a fire door with no window. He placed his ear to the door and listened.

  “Anything?” Schwarz whispered.

  Lyons shook his head. He put his hand on the door handle and, this time, the exit was unlocked. He started to ease the door open.

  “Stop!” Schwarz hissed. “I heard a click. I definitely heard a click. I mean I think I did.”

  Lyons looked up. The door was open perhaps an inch. He glanced at Schwarz in irritation. “Did you or didn’t you? Pol, you hear anything?”

  “I don’t think I heard anything,” said Blancanales.

  “Am I about to trigger a bomb or aren’t I?” Lyons demanded. “Gadgets, get over here and check it out.”

  Schwarz knelt by the crack in the door and peered through with one eye. He held up a hand. “There’s a wire. Hang on.” He took his folding knife from his pocket, opened it and placed the blade in the gap between the door and the door frame.

  “If the bomb has been triggered,” Blancanales said, “won’t cutting the wire release the pressure and set it off?”

  “Fifty, fifty,” Schwarz said. “Gimme a sec.”

  “Wait, what?” Lyons said.

  Blancanales dragged in a breath and held it.

  Schwarz cut the wire.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The members of Phoenix Force paddled their rubber launch through the cover of darkness. Twilight had only recently transitioned to full darkness. The stars overhead, the sound of the waves…it would have been a beautiful night, if not for the grim business that awaited them on the captured freighter. The Bapor na Pangkargada looked deceptively quiet as they made their way silently toward it.

  The Glock pistols the men carried—as well as McCarter’s Browning—had threaded barrels. The team had affixed sound suppressors to their pistols to facilitate quiet takedowns once they got on board. To do that, though, they would first have to create an opening. At the front of the boat, Hawkins and Encizo took the lead in steering the rubber landing craft, which had been borrowed from the Filipino navy.