by Dick Stivers
Having lulled the enemy, Lyons thrust the Atchisson around the doorway and fired a three-round burst to one side. He was back, away from the opening before there was any return fire. When the firing died down, someone was still screaming.
The sixth mattress collected another sixty or seven rounds of .223 ammo. Then heavy firing broke out to one side of the doorway as Gadgets and Pol arrived.
Lyons ignored the direction of the firing and dropped behind his thick wall of mattresses. The terror goons at the other end of the hall had begun a charge to help their fellow killers. They found themselves facing the end of the Atchisson.
While Pol and Gadgets mopped up one end of the hall, Lyons reasoned with the terrorists who were charging from the other end. The steady boom, boom, boom of the Atchisson demolished all arguments for terrorism.
“Where are the pros?” Lyons demanded as soon as the rest of Able Team joined him.
“Gone. They never stopped,” Gadgets reported.
Lyons led the way down a side hall, opening doors as he went, but there seemed to be nobody left in the building. Suddenly Lyons stopped and listened.
“Sirens already, and we have a dozen killers running around and no idea where they are,” he said over his shoulder.
“Not right,” Pol corrected him. “While you stopped at the doughnut shop, Gadgets went back and put a beeper on one of the taxis just in case.”
“Let’s go,” Lyons said, leading the way downstairs at a full run.
Pol drove the van while Gadgets used the radio. Lyons followed in the T-bird. Soon they were headed north.
“Looks as if we’re headed back to the airport,” Lyons said through the microphone.
“More likely Fairfax Municipal Airport this time,” Gadgets replied. “It’s on the other side of the river.”
A little later Gadgets broadcast again. “The signal is coming back toward us.”
Lyons sped the T-bird around the van. As soon as he spotted one of the taxis he had been following, he steered the Ford into the oncoming lanes and stopped it in front of the taxi. It took a few millimeters from the brake lining, but the driver managed to stop the cab on time.
He stuck his head out the window and yelled. “You nut! Get yourself wiped out by someone else.”
Lyons walked up to the driver’s window. Then he pulled a wad of money from his pocket. As the driver watched he peeled off a five and a twenty.
“Your fare from the airport, downtown and back here, where did you drop them?”
The driver stuck his hand out the window. Lyons put the money into it.
“Acme Charter Service. The orange building over there. They’re as nuts as you are.”
Lyons laughed and tossed another five into the cab before returning to his car.
“Not nearly as nuts as I am,” he told the startled driver.
*
“Yeah. They chartered an executive jet to St. Paul. You’ll never catch up to them,” the clerk at the charter-flight office told them.
Lyons turned to Gadgets. “Get Grimaldi here. Now.”
15
July 13, 2004 hours, Minneapolis, Minnesota
J. Courtney Cain was a man who loved to talk. Usually it was not necessary for others to be willing to talk; it was enough that they should simply listen. However, in this case, he wanted his prisoner to talk and found her refusal to do so very frustrating.
Cain mechanically slapped his swagger stick against his right leg as he stared at Toni Blancanales. The stick tapped against carefully pressed fatigues, which Cain thought made him look very military. Unfortunately, at five-foot two, with long hair combed back to cover a bald spot, he looked more comic than military, a deficiency he found difficult to ignore when he saw the mockery in his prisoner’s dark eyes.
“I am not entirely stupid…” J. Courtney began.
He stopped when he noticed the quirk at the corner of Toni’s lips. He regretted his choice of phrase. The swagger stick whistled, Toni’s head was jerked to one side. Soon an angry welt began to form on one cheek, just under the right eye. It joined three similar welts on the left side of her face. She struggled briefly against the ropes that held her to a wooden chair. Then her head dropped.
Cain tried again. As he spoke he paced back and forth in front of Toni, waving his stick and speaking as if he were addressing a class.
“First, Atlanta gets pounded during a raid. They lose half their force. Then Boston gets mauled during a raid and the rest of Atlanta’s HIT trainees get wiped.
“It doesn’t take much brains to figure that there’s some sort of a force after us. Now I’m told that our trainees have been massacred in Kansas. That leaves me with the distinctly uncomfortable feeling that we may be next, here in Minneapolis. So, you can see that I was already on the alert. And when I do a sweep of the area, what do I find? I find that a lady investigator has us under surveillance.”
He paused and brought his pockmarked face close to Toni’s.
“Now, do you understand that I will go to any length necessary to find out what we’re up against?”
The tip of the swagger stick slammed viciously into her solar plexus, leaving her gagging and gasping for air. Cain waited patiently the seven minutes it took for Toni to recover control of her breathing and pay attention to his questions.
“Why were you watching this building?”
“Screw off,” she spat.
The swagger stick dug into her solar plexus with such force that she lost consciousness. Cain swore. He had not intended to lose time having to wait until she recovered. The woman was so damn maddening. But, he knew he would eventually get the information he wanted. The Nazis who taught him the techniques were experts with years of practice.
He left her alone for a while. When he returned, he could tell right away that she was faking. He wandered in as if he did not know better and started to tap her head very lightly with his swagger stick. She held out amazingly well, pretending not to feel the light taps, but Cain knew better. By now it would feel like she was being hit with a battering ram. Her head would feel as if it were being battered inside a bass drum. He could see the neck muscles tighten with each tap. Finally she began to scream.
“Now,” he said with satisfaction. “Now, you will tell me what I want to know.”
She was weeping uncontrollably. She nodded her head.
“Who will be coming?”
“Able Team.”
“When?”
“They… they would be here by now.”
That shook Cain. He would have thought he had more time. Surely it took longer than that to get to Minneapolis from Kansas City. Something was wrong.
“How many strong is Able Team?”
“Three.”
He swung the stick onto the same spot on her head. She screamed.
“How many?”
“Only three. They should be studying this place right now.”
It suddenly made sense. First send a spy. Then send three scouts. After that, bring in the main body of killers to wipe the place out. Of course, the scouts could easily arrive long before the main body. They did not have to wait until one fight was finished before moving on. Cain turned and sprinted from the soundproof interrogation room. He ran up to the communications room and strode in there.
“Get me our patrol leaders,” Cain told the radioman.
The radio operator handed the unit commander a microphone.
“You’re on both walkie-talkie channels,” he told his commander.
“This is Cain.”
He waited for two voices to acknowledge before continuing. “There should be three men out there scouting us. Locate them, but leave them alone. Don’t move in until the main force moves in to attack. Take the scouts only if they spot you. Have you got that?”
Two voices acknowledged.
Cain left the radio room and decided to do a tour of interior defenses before returning to the interrogation room. When whoever it was attacked, they were going to ge
t hit back much harder than they had ever been hit before. Cain was grinning like a death’s head as he made his rounds of the old warehouse that had become the HIT headquarters.
*
“That’s the building, according to the intel from the Bear,” Lyons said.
It was a warehouse — old, brick and ugly. All three stories were living and training quarters for a Harassment Initiation Team. WAR had separate, more respectable offices farther uptown.
Pol grabbed the walkie-talkie out of Gadgets’s hand.
“Let me try that,” Pol demanded. “Little sister? Come in little sister.”
There was no more response than for the fifty or more times that Gadgets had tried it. Pol handed it back.
“We’re being watched,” Lyons told his two team members. “Fade.”
“I want to talk to someone from that joint,” Pol said. His voice held an edge of steel that was usually completely hidden.
“We fade. Carefully.” Lyons ordered.
“I’m going to grab one of those killers,” Pol insisted. “Toni left word with the office that she has the place under surveillance and has her walkie-talkie with her. They’ve got her.”
Lyons clamped a grip of steel on Politician’s upper arm.
“We leave,” he said sternly.
They strolled in silence until well clear of the area.
*
“I don’t know why we were allowed to walk out of that ambush,” Lyons said. “But we don’t have much time. Let’s pick up the heavy-duty artillery and make a sweep. We’ll start with the soldiers covering the ambushers, then take the ambushers and then move in on the building. That’s playing it by the book, but it stinks.”
“Why werewe allowed to walk?” Gadgets insisted.
“Maybe Toni didn’t tell them anything,” Pol said. His voice was a whisper.
“You know better than that,” Lyons said.
“The drugs they have these days…” Gadgets added, trying to soften the cruel reality of Lyons’s words.
The terror fighters were back at the van that Toni had left at the airport for them. It belonged to Able Group, the company owned by Schwarz and Blancanales, and managed by Toni Blancanales. The company specialized in industrial security. The van was one of its quick-response vehicles.
“I still smell something wrong,” Lyons said as he fastened a web belt around his waist.
*
As soon as J. Courtney Cain left the interrogation room, Toni began working on the knots that held her. The goons who had tied her up were much more interested in letting their hands wander than in checking what they were doing. Toni had been able to tense her muscles and twist her arms. Now she relaxed and worked with the slack. It took time, time that she did not know whether she had. She had run into trouble before. Twice the big man, Mack Bolan, had come to her aid. She had learned from him and learned well. So she fought one battle at a time with total concentration, not allowing the uncertainty of the next minutes to rob her of her effectiveness.
Soon the knots gave and she was free. The next problem was to arm herself.
She opened the door a crack. No one was in the hall outside. She went back and picked up the wooden chair to which she had been tied. She smashed it against the cement floor again and again. Finally, she had a piece of the back of the chair that made a fairly passable club.
She was reasonably certain that her purse was still on the main floor, in Cain’s office. Her objective was the purse for inside was a weapon and the walkie-talkie.
She met a terrorist-in-training running along the hall, M-16 in one hand and a sandwich in the other. She stepped in front of him and brought the club up into the goon’s groin. As he bent forward, Toni grabbed a fistful of his grimy hair and yanked. The would-be terrorist crashed into the wall headfirst. Two hard blows with the club kept him on the floor.
Toni grabbed the M-16 and patted her victim down for spare clips. He carried only one. She jammed that in her belt and took off, checking the load and cocking the assault rifle as she ran.
The rest was easy. There was no one in the office. The walkie-talkie was still in her purse. So was the Heckler & Koch VP-70 that Pol insisted she carry. She sat down in the desk chair facing the door. She placed the automatic in her waistband, and the magazine for the M-16 on the desk. Then the M-16 was set down carefully, still cocked and ready to roar, pointing at the door, ready to be grabbed in an instant. Only then did she get out the walkie-talkie and start to call for Able Team.
*
The backup men who were meant to cover the retreat of those in the ambush went first. Able Team knew what they were looking for and they found them. The barely concealed automatic handguns left no mistake about the terrorists’ identities. Politician removed one man with a garrote, so quickly and so savagely that the thin wire went right through the neck. The goon’s dying kick booted his own head into the gutter.
Gadgets used his Gerber to efficiently sever the top of a spine. The killer collapsed without a sound. Lyons silently removed two more with his lethal fists.
The ambushers waited patiently, strung out along the tops of two buildings. They were still waiting when silenced .45 and 9mm slugs smashed heads .Able Team left them slumped over their guns and started back down a flimsy fire escape. Suddenly, Gadgets’s walkie-talkie let out its discreet buzz.
Gadgets stopped so abruptly that Pol ran into him. Lyons noticed he was no longer being tagged by the rest of his team and carefully retreated. His eyes skimmed the territory for more enemy.
“Don’t stop on the exposed escape,” he hissed.
“That you, Toni?” Gadgets said.
“You were expecting someone else?” she replied.
The relief was too much to contain. Both Gadgets and Pol started to laugh.
“Where are you?” Toni’s voice asked.
“Just ready to move in on the building. We had to take out an ambush first. Where are you?”
“Right here waiting, but you better try cutting out. Most of the force is in cars waiting for you to show signs of being in the area. The only thing that’s stopping them from scooping you is that they’re expecting a larger force.”
“I wonder what gave them that notion?” Gadgets said.
“I wonder. I figured since I was foolish enough to get caught, it might as well serve some purpose.”
Gadgets looked at Lyons who nodded.
“Sit tight. Here we come,” he told Toni.
“Don’t. It’s a well-planned trap.”
“You say they’re all mobile?”
“Right.”
“Great. Here we come. Out.”
With the ambush out of the way, Lyons led his team right in the front door of the HIT headquarters. As they walked in, the first of the troop trucks could be seen turning a corner at the end of the block. Without warning from the ambushers, the reserves did not get tipped off until someone from the building saw Able Team walking up to the front door.
Lyons had the assault shotgun rigged with a 30-round drum. Pol carried his usual M-79 and a large supply of frag grenades for the launcher. Gadgets kept his Ingram at the ready.
Pol stayed at the door while Lyons and Gadgets investigated the reception area. Pol watched as two light trucks and a carload of troops stopped in front of the building. As soon as he saw weapons, he opened fire.
The fragmentation and white phosphorous grenades were carefully spread at his feet. He fired as quickly as he could reload. The first frag landed in the back of the truck, stunning those few it did not kill. The second went through the window of the car, taking out the unit commander and radioman. The next two grenades were phosphorous. They sprayed the men in the second car with fire that burned as it penetrated their bodies. In less than five seconds the street was a fiery hell, filled with the screams of the dying.
The only terrorists left inside the building were raw recruits. They were grouped around the communications room on the top floor.
When Able Team found
Toni she smiled, picked up the M-16 and joined them. Gadgets found another contingent of mobile troops were covering the other entrance to the building.
He radioed Lyons who moved to the back of the second floor. Half of a 30-round drum of heavy pellets fired from the second-floor window reduced the backup terrorists to a mixture of gore and auto parts.
*
J. Courtney Cain was a man who loved to talk. At this moment he would have preferred that others talk to him. First, he had lost contact with the sniping party. So, he had called the mobile troops and told them to move in cautiously. Both troops had reported moving right into the building. Then he had lost radio contact with both halves of his mobile pincers.
“Get me the interior patrol,” he told the radio operator.
But firing burst out outside the door. He knew that the interior patrol would not answer either. He leveled his Colt Commander at the door and waited.
“Let head office know what’s happening,” he ordered the radioman.
Before the radio operator could respond, the knob of the door began to turn. Cain put a half clip through the door from bottom to top.
*
Politician saw the bullets stitch the terrorist who had tried to retreat into the room he was supposed to be guarding. Two shots from Lyons’s assault shotgun cleared away the last of the guards on the top floor.
Politician and Toni approached the room together. Pol picked up an assault rifle and threw it against the door. Another hail of angry bullets flew out through the wood. Pol then booted the door. It split up the middle to reveal a small man in perfectly pressed fatigues, desperately trying to change clips with shaking hands. Behind him a radio operator frantically tried to raise someone to come to his aid.
Toni walked to the shattered door. “Goodbye, Commander,” she said.