War Tactic

by Don Pendleton

  The Stony Man Farm commandos entered the nearest access hatch and worked their way into this new section of the rig. According to the deck plan, they were three levels above the main control room. McCarter was willing to bet that it was there—where he had the most ability to monitor the rest of the rig—that Wijeya would be holed up. And if they were going to beard the dragon in its lair, they were going to need something working to their advantage. They needed Wijeya off balance, angry, ready to make a mistake.

  McCarter opened his transceiver connection and switched the frequency of his radio to the band on which they had communicated with the pirate previously.

  “Wijeya,” said McCarter. “This is the man who killed your first mate. I just wanted you to know that he died badly. I have to admit I kind of shined you on a little before. I did put a bullet into him. But that was just to finish it.”

  “I love it when he starts telling stories,” James said quietly.

  “My men took turns torturing him,” McCarter lied. “They get so bored, the lads. It seemed a shame to deny them some entertainment. So I let them go to work on him. It took a while. And the whole time, poor, loyal sod, he was calling your name. ‘Wijeya! Wijeya! Why have you abandoned me?’ he kept saying. I tell you, old chap, I finally put a bullet through his brain just because I couldn’t take the wailing any longer.”

  McCarter waited. Finally he was rewarded. Wijeya’s voice came on the line. “I am going to cut you apart, ‘David.’ I am going to make you pay for Mhusa. I am going to make your men watch while you die, and then I am going to torture each one of them so badly that death will not be a punishment, but a release about which they can only dream. When your men are lying, quivering, like sacks of deformed meat, and wishing they had never followed you, I will cut out your eyes and cut off your tongue and throw your body to the sea. And then I will force what I have taken from you down the throats of your men until they choke.”

  Once more, the line went dead.

  “Well,” James said, “I’d say you probably annoyed him a little.”

  “Just a little,” Encizo agreed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The Suburban blasted through the entrance to the RhemCorp building, crushing Blackstar personnel under its wheels, scattering armed resistance with the force and the speed of its entry into the lobby. Carl Lyons threw the truck into Park and stepped down from the vehicle. He let his shotgun lie on its sling and drew his Colt Python. With the big pistol, he began firing mercy rounds into the heads of the struggling Blackstar men lying on the floor. Several of them had broken, twisted limbs hanging at odd angles. As Blancanales and Schwarz joined him, the gunshots silenced their screams and moans.

  “Well, well,” said the voice of Harold Rhemsen.

  Lyons looked up. There were a pair of speakers set high on the wall, near the ceiling, and between them was a closed-circuit television camera. The light on the camera was blinking. As Lyons watched, the lens of the camera extended as the device zoomed in on him.

  “Yeah,” Lyons said. “Well, well. You’re under arrest, Rhemsen. Call off your goons.” He looked around the lobby. One of the entrances had been blown using grenades or some other kind of explosive. It was completely collapsed. There was another doorway, though, leading into the rest of the building. Obviously, Rhemsen was hoping his enemies would take this route. Lyons thought about the man-trap device that had nearly killed Schwarz. Not only did it stoke the fires of his anger, but it made him that much more determined not to play Rhemsen’s game.

  “I have money,” Rhemsen said. “More money than you’ll make in ten lifetimes as a paid assassin.”

  “We’re not assassins,” Lyons countered. “We’re garbage men. Our job is to sweep up trash like you and make sure it gets where it belongs.”

  “That’s very poetic,” Rhemsen said. “And quite irrelevant. I know where I belong. It isn’t here. It was never here.”

  “Cry me a river,” said Lyons. “We know you’ve got a small army of goons in there. I will personally see to it that every last one of them dies on this property, today, along with you, if you don’t surrender right now. I’m at the end of my patience with you, Rhemsen. This game is over. You lost. Now get with the program or get dead. Choice is yours.”

  “First,” Rhemsen said, “we’re going to play a little game. This building has been specially designed with defense in mind. You know that it is my fallback location. You wouldn’t be here if you did not. If you thought the traps waiting for you in Hilton Head were bad, you haven’t even begun to imagine what I’m going to put you through now.”

  “What are you getting out of this, Rhemsen?” Lyons demanded. “Money? Do you think you’re going to have any financial assets in the United States that aren’t frozen once the US government gets through with you? Your empire is over. Your reputation is destroyed. When this is done you’ll be lucky if you’re not flushed into some black-ops prison somewhere.”

  “Isn’t that the American way,” Rhemsen said.

  There was a weird tinge to his voice now, an accent that Lyons could not place. He looked at his partners curiously. Schwarz shrugged. Blancanales shook his head. Neither of them knew what to make of it, either.

  “Last I knew, you were American,” Lyons said. “You’re the kind of corrupt fat cat that’s built the worst of our financial problems, Rhemsen. You think you won’t be held accountable for everything you’ve done? The national security you’ve endangered? Hell, they might just charge you with treason. And the penalty for that is death. Think you’re going to be chuckling so loud when they strap you into the gas chamber, or put you on a gurney for a final nap to Hell with a needle in your arm?”

  “Tough talk, American,” Rhemsen said. “But you still have to find me. And I think perhaps you’ll be killed before you get this far. As for me, don’t worry about what I get out of this. My future is planned. I know where I am headed, and I will be better off for it. I have stayed one step ahead of you and your pathetic government all the while. Nothing will change. Before this is over, the United States will experience the humiliation it so richly deserves.”

  “Stuff it, you plastic-faced freak,” Lyons said. When Rhemsen did not immediately reply, Lyons piled it on. “That’s right. You didn’t think all that plastic surgery actually made you look better, did you? You could stop a clock from across a room and have enough ugly left over for seconds.”

  Lyons looked at Schwarz, who held his palm out, flat, parallel to the floor, and waggled it back and forth. “Meh,” he said.

  “Fine,” Lyons said under his breath. To Rhemsen, he said, “So you want me to enter your little funhouse of horrors, right, Harry?” He thumbed back the hammer on his Colt Python. “I bet you’d really like that. I bet you’re just salivating at the thought of me walking a death-trap-strewed path that leads straight to your door by way of some horror-movie, clockwork bear-trap thing. Well, I got news for you, you dumb bastard. I’m coming up. And I’m doing it my way.”

  Lyons raised his pistol and pulled the trigger. The remote camera exploded. For good measure, Lyons pumped a couple of bullets each into the speakers. The sound that came after that was scratchy and tinny, barely audible.

  “Then come up here and catch me if you can,” Rhemsen challenged. There was a final burst of static and the transmission stopped.

  “That’s our Ironman,” Blancanales said. “Master of winning hearts and minds.”

  “My hero,” Schwarz quipped.

  “Now what?” Blancanales asked. “We still have to make our way up to wherever he’s holed up.”

  “They always pull this video-game strategy,” Schwarz said. “I guarantee you he’s in some kind of office at the top level. Like the main boss at the end of a video game. And we’ve got to fight our way through the sublevel bosses to get to him. What do you want to bet that Fitzpatrick is lurking around here somewhere?”

  “I should get so lucky,” Lyons said. He examined the one doorway that they could use,
the one that had not been collapsed by Rhemsen’s trigger men. “I can tell you this. There’s no way any of us is going through that door.”

  “How else?” Blancanales said. He examined the wrecked entrance. “We could try blowing this, but it looks bad. I don’t think we’re going to do anything but make the blockage worse.”

  “You guys,” Lyons said. “You never have any faith in me.” He walked to the Suburban and retrieved his war bag. Slinging it over his shoulder, he took out a drum that was specially tagged with a paint marker. This was how Cowboy Kissinger preferred to designate magazines. Every one of the loaded mags he provided to the Stony Man teams had a number. You never knew when you might discover a magazine had gotten bent during combat and become unusable, and if you didn’t label them, how could you tell one from another?

  This magazine was labeled with something more than a number: SO. That was Kissinger’s designation for “slugs only.” As Schwarz and Blancanales watched, Lyons began humming a song to himself.

  “Is…is that…?” Schwarz said.

  “No way,” Blancanales said.

  “You can’t hum ‘Soul Finger,’” Schwarz said. “It just…it just isn’t right. Some things are just wrong, Ironman!”

  But Lyons wasn’t listening. He was too focused on how good what he was about to do was going to feel. The big former cop loaded the drum magazine into his automatic shotgun, jacked in the first round and began firing from the hip only six feet from the door. His target, however, was not the doorway from the lobby. He was shooting into the wall adjacent to that door.

  It didn’t take long to empty the drum. Still humming, he dropped the empty and loaded a fresh one. Again, he fired away, blazing with the deafening weapon, firing from the hip as the shotgun rested against its sling. When he had emptied a third drum, he was finally satisfied. He reloaded once again, stepped closer, raised his combat boot and kicked out with all his might.

  The hole he had just carved in the wall broke open as he smashed through the piece of drywall he had just sectioned out. He used the force of his body like a battering ram, lowering his shoulder to shove through the rest of it. Once on the other side, covered in pieces of insulation and drywall dust, he gestured for Blancanales and Schwarz to follow.

  “Well?” he said. “Don’t just stand there staring with your mouths open. Let’s get the hell going.”

  They stepped through the gap in the wall to follow their team leader. Lyons gestured to the other side of the door leading from the lobby. There were enough plastic explosives wired to that door to wipe out much of the lower floor of the building.

  “I’d like to say that’s a surprise,” Schwarz said. “But it’s really not. Not after everything we’ve seen from this guy so far.”

  “I really, really do not like Harold Rhemsen,” Blancanales declared.

  “Can you do anything about that, Gadgets?” Lyons said. “I’m not exactly comfortable leaving that behind us.”

  “Sure thing,” Schwarz said. “I can work wonders when I don’t have a slowly retracting un-fun box o’ death clamped on my noggin.” He began yanking detonator sticks out of the blocks of plastic explosives.

  “Wait,” Lyons said. “That’s it? You’re just pulling out the detonators? You don’t want to cut any wires or do anything tricky?”

  “I can cut wires if it makes you feel better,” Schwarz said. “But this isn’t exactly a tamper-proof circuit. It’s designed to blow people up when they open the door. It doesn’t need to be very tricky to do that.” He finished. “All set. Let’s go see what other fun things Rhemsen has waiting.”

  “Joy,” Lyons growled.

  What had once been an office cubicle farm had been torn apart. Wooden beams and plywood had been used to create a maze, similar to the one they had faced in Hilton Head. At first, Lyons had led the three men as they carefully crept through the path that was laid out, but by the time they discovered and circumvented their fourth tripwire, it was obvious that following the path Rhemsen had created was going to get them killed sooner rather than later.

  “Give me all the door poppers,” Lyons said.

  Schwarz and Blancanales formed a relay team. Blancanales would dig through the duffel bag of goodies from the Farm, handing off the explosives to Schwarz. The electronics genius would then dole out the explosives one at a time to Lyons, who would use the bombs to blow hole after hole in Rhemsen’s wooden maze. Soon, a trail of ragged, splintered craters led from one end of the room to other.

  Once on the other side, the Able Team commandos looked over their handiwork. It was Blancanales who said what they were all thinking.

  “We have to come through here in a hurry, especially under fire, we might blunder into something.”

  “Nah,” Lyons said. “I don’t think so. Give me the grens.”

  Once more they formed their little relay line, but this time, Blancanales would hand Schwarz grenades, Schwarz would pop the pins and Lyons would throw them. Lyons had a good, strong pitching arm. They worked their way from the back of the room to as close to their current position as they dared. It wouldn’t do to nail themselves with one of their own explosive surprises.

  At the end of the cubicle farm was an elevator shaft and a stairwell. The stairwell was blocked off with boards nailed to the wall. The elevator stood open, waiting. A piece of duct tape had been used to block the electric eye, which held the doors open.

  “Wow,” Schwarz said.

  “I know, right?” Blancanales said. “Talk about considerate.”

  Lyons walked over and ripped the duct tape from the door before retreating to stand next to his teammates. He hunkered down and covered his head with his arms.

  “Uh,” Blancanales said.

  “Right,” Schwarz said. The two teammates joined their leader crouching on the floor. It was a good thing they did, too.

  The moment the elevator doors closed, some kind of relay was triggered. The explosion that sounded from within the elevator dropped the metal box into the basement, from the sounds of things. The vibration of the blast shook this part of the building. Somewhere, a fire alarm started to go off. Sprinklers above them began to douse them with water.

  Lyons stood. “That’s much better,” he sighed.

  “Come on, guys,” Schwarz said. “Let’s see what’s on the stairs. Oh, wait. We used all the door poppers.”

  “Popped door,” Lyons said, “coming up.” He brought up his shotgun and began mercilessly spraying the fire door to the stairs, splitting the wooden beams that had been nailed across it. When he had spent another two drums and exhausted his supply of shotgun ammunition, he placed the USAS-12 quietly on the floor, pulled the last of the wooden beams away and yanked the door open.

  “Nothing went boom,” Schwarz said.

  “Yeah,” Lyons said. “Let’s get the hell up there. I’m tired of playing these games.”

  “You keep saying that,” Schwarz said. “I have to admit, I’m kind of tired of playing my game, too. I’m stuck on Level 99 and I can’t seem to get any farther.”

  They climbed the stairs, taking them one at a time, going slow to check for pressure plates and tripwires. This, unfortunately for Lyons, gave Schwarz entirely too much time to talk. “The real problem with the game,” he said, “is the halo system.”

  “Stop talking, Gadgets,” Lyons ordered as they climbed.

  “See, if you complete level without using too much of your mana score,” Schwarz went on, “you get a halo. And if you can do it within a time limit specified by each level, you get a second halo. But to get a perfect three-halo score on the level, you’ve got to find a way to complete the level in less than the recommended threshold times. It’s a real bear, I can tell you. I got stuck on that level and—”

  “I’m going to put you back in that bear-trap thing,” Lyons rumbled. “I swear I will.”

  They reached the top. The fire door here was propped open. Beyond it was a series of darkened hallways. When Lyons’s boot hit the floor
, the floorboard creaked.

  The sound of a rifle bolt being pulled back was all Lyons needed to tip him off.

  There wasn’t even time to shout an alarm. Lyons fell backward, throwing out his arms, knocking both of his team members to the floor with him. The gunfire that followed ripped apart the walls above them and coated them in Sheetrock fragments. Lyons, Schwarz and Blancanales returned fire. They emptied their guns, reloaded and emptied them again. The shooting went on and they started running low, finally, on ammunition. Blancanales tossed his Beretta 92-F to Lyons when he ran out of speedloaders for his Python. Lyons started burning through magazines of 9 mm bullets.

  As bad as the odds were, Able Team was making a dent. The legions of Blackstar soldiers who came up against them fell, one after another. Soon the bodies were two and three deep. This was no longer an office, no longer a manufacturing facility. It was a slaughterhouse.

  “I’m empty!” Schwarz shouted.

  “Me, too,” Blancanales said.

  “Crap,” Lyons swore. “Dry here, too.”

  But the shooting from the outer rooms had stopped. Lyons stood and, careful lest he take a bullet through the face for his trouble, poked one eye around the corner. All he saw were corpses.

  “Carl?” Schwarz said. “What do you see?”

  “The way out,” Lyons answered. “Come on. The door past this section is clear.”

  Moving cautiously, the members of Able Team made it past the death-house floor. They cleared the final doorway. Beyond it was some kind of vast training area, the kind of modular conference room that had walls that could be extended from side to side to chop up the space and make for multiple sub-rooms. Everything had been cleared out to make the space as large as possible. The floor was completely bare except for the institutional carpeting.

  Jason Fitzpatrick stood there.

  “I gotta say,” Fitzpatrick said, “I don’t normally go in for this kind of thing. But you three? You’ve cost me a hell of a lot of time and aggravation. And I’m in a pretty good mood. See, I came into some money. So I thought to myself, ‘Jason, you handsome devil, how are you going to reward yourself for all your hard work?’ And I finally figured it out. I know what I deserve.”