Show of Force

by Gar Wilson

  "Got 'em, mate," he said as he raised his rifle.

  "No. No, shooting," Katz repeated even as the point of a knife made a slit in his shirt not far from the heart.

  The feisty Israeli had taken the proper defense. He squeezed the enemy's wrist between his left arm and the left side of his torso. But the move also froze him in position and the second knife wielder grinned, smelling the kill.

  McCarter leaped in, raised his rifle over his head with both hands, and brought it down in front of the enemy's face, down to the Adam's apple area, and hauled back fast and hard.

  The man grunted and gagged, trying to twist his knife into McCarter's flesh. The urgent need to breathe, though, proved to be his undoing, and he dropped his knife in an attempt to push the rifle away from his neck.

  In the time it took the man to die, Katz dropped his rifle and used the hooks of his prosthetic device to worry his other adversary's eye, and took advantage of that distraction to sink the man's own knife into his chest and hold it there until the twitching stopped.

  Now there was time to look around.

  They were the only ones standing, and they were standing in the center of an open graveyard.

  They wasted only seconds checking their own wounds.

  "Why didn't you let us shoot them?" McCarter challenged.

  "Explanations later," Katz said. "The women are escaping."

  They dashed into the street. The women had reached cover inside several buildings, but one tall figure was seen racing toward the church.

  It was Ann Cardwell, the beautiful woman who had greeted him pleasantly inside the restaurant. She was obviously rushing to sound the warning.

  Gary Manning lifted his rifle. He would never miss at that range. The woman was not even crouching or dodging.

  Katz imagined that beautiful body lying on the pavement face down in her own blood.

  Manning's rifle settled on a bead.

  With a quick motion Katz batted the barrel down.

  Manning was surprised. "Hey, she's going to sound the alarm. We'll have the entire town down on us."

  "Nothing will bring people into the streets faster than a rifle shot," Katz said.

  "Okay, then what do we do?"

  "Take the gun shop for now," Katz said.

  A moment later Katz provided cover while Manning and McCarter burst into the gun store. It was brightly lit inside.

  A clerk smiled at them from behind the counter. "Good evening, gentlemen," he said with a saccharine smile.

  Manning barely raised his rifle. He fired from the hip, and a black hole opened in the clerk's forehead, and a deeply shocked look appeared on his face.

  McCarter frowned at his friend, not understanding why Manning had fired in violation of Katz's orders.

  To satisfy himself, McCarter leaped the counter while the clerk was sliding to the floor. The dead man's hand clenched a Colt Python that he had nearly freed of its holster.

  "I saw him make his move," Gary Manning said.

  "Good thing you did."

  As a precaution McCarter took the long-barreled.357 Magnum and tossed it across the room. Dead men sometimes were not as dead as they looked.

  "He should have used a snubnosed piece," Gary commented dryly. "He might have cleared the holster in time."

  Then they took a good look around them, at the unexpected bounty, and realized that they had just run into a speck of good luck in the midst of their difficult situation.

  "We've hit a bloody gold mine," McCarter said.

  "The mother lode," Manning agreed.

  The shop was an arsenal. Handguns hid one wall, everything from Fred Adolph's Gem, a single-shot, long-range.22 designed and built as early as 1910, to an Uzi pistol adapted for full automatic fire with a 32-round magazine of 9 mm parabellum shells.

  Manning used his rifle butt to shatter the glass in the protective case and grabbed the Uzi.

  Outside, the church bell clanged with angry urgency.

  "So much for stealth." McCarter picked another wall display and took an FIE SPAS-12 auto assault shotgun in his left hand and, dropping his rifle, reached with his right hand for the closest thing he could reach. a 32-shot Demo TAC-1M carbine. The weight surprised him. "Hey, this thing is already loaded."

  "Everything is loaded," Manning said. He rushed to the front of the store. "And everything possible has been made full automatic. They must have been expecting a full-scale war."

  Manning had just reached the window when he heard a shot, then another and another.

  He saw Katz retreating to the store with a mob of unarmed Russians charging after him. With every shot, one of the men flew backward or doubled over with a tunnel that a bullet had cut through his guts. Just outside the door, a burly stevedore type grabbed Katz by the arm.

  Manning fired a 3-round burst from the Uzi pistol. The window exploded. Shards of glass bloodied the men behind Katz, blinding some of them. The bullets found yielding flesh, and the restraining hand dropped away from Katz's sleeve.

  It was a close shot Manning had not wanted to make.

  Katz whirled toward the shop, and the mob, undaunted, leaped at him. Several pairs of hands reached out, clutched and held him like an insect on flypaper.

  "Hang in there, buddy," Manning yelled. He fired a longer burst that cleared a space in the crowd in a rather drastic manner.

  Freed, Katz bolted across the sidewalk and dove headfirst through the gaping window frame.

  He rolled across the floor, unaware of the powdered glass biting his flesh. McCarter jumped over him to provide support for Manning, who had run out of ammunition in the Uzi pistol.

  Six of the locals lunged across the sidewalk in a virtual suicide attack. McCarter resisted the urge to back away. He had to stay up front to keep the enemy from reaching the safe interiors of adjoining stores.

  "Number one," he yelled, turning the FIE SPAS-12 auto assault shotgun on the closest attacker.

  The blast hit the man in the lower abdomen and sent him flying backward in a spiderlike dance.

  McCarter then swung the gun in the direction of a tall shape sprinting toward him with track-meet speed.

  The shot metamorphosed the runner into a high hurdler, then spun the man to the ground. Another of the Briton's shots blew a thin weed of a man high into the air and into the hereafter. A third dropped short of the sidewalk.

  Gary Manning shouted behind McCarter, "Number three." He had taken a new.223 Bushmaster from the wall, thumbed loose the safety and fired twice.

  The muzzle-flash from the short barrel was awesome. It obviously impressed still another track star hurling himself toward the Englishman.

  In a desperate attempt to stop, the man flung himself onto the sidewalk and skidded through the broken glass. His head struck the bricks beneath the window. Manning leaned out easily and put a bullet through the man's brains.

  "That one count?" he asked.

  McCarter shook his head. "No, sitting ducks don't count, old chap."

  The crowd outside had thinned with the casualties, and some of the remainder took flight while others backed away, allowing Manning and McCarter to leisurely pick them off. In so doing they inspired the survivors to greater speed.

  A sudden quiet descended, and the pair tried to relax momentarily, but it was too soon.

  At that moment a loud crack deafened McCarter's right ear. He whirled to see a stranger crouching in the back room. He was emptying a Czech CZ-75 at the two Phoenix Force soldiers near the front of the store, and in an attempt to kill both, he fired between them.

  Katz snatched up the first gun he could reach, and in quick order dispatched the Russian with a true shot to the heart.

  Another Russian burst in from the back room, his attack rifle on full automatic, his finger glued to the trigger. The air six feet above the floor buzzed like a hive of killer bees. Had he used more control and less courage, he would have wiped the Phoenix detachment from the slate of the living. Instead he let the muzzle climb and s
prayed the ceiling.

  Katz's shotgun chomped away at the man's flesh, and Katz looked away, reminded again that a shotgun was not a neat instrument.

  "We no longer have a monopoly on guns," Manning commented.

  "McCarter," Katz ordered, "get in the back room. Cover our rear and see if we can retreat that way."

  McCarter nodded, then snatched an automatic weapon from the wall and, weapon blazing, entered the rear room. Katz took more loaded guns and slid them into the back room. From the exchange of bullets he could judge that there was no safe exit out the back.

  Manning was also clearly engaged in battle. "Katz," he called. "We got trouble up front."

  "Tell me when there are new developments."

  "I'm serious."

  Katz, behind the counter, stuffed a Ruger Super Blackhawk KS-411 into his waistband. With its ten and a half inch untapered barrel, it had the weight necessary to hold down the.44 Magnum shells.

  Manning fired a short burst and told Katz the next development outside.

  "They're in the tavern, trying to reach the roof." He shot again, and across the street somebody toppled as though it was suddenly all too much for him. "If they get there, they'll be shooting straight down our throats."

  The Phoenix Force leader got the message. The tavern's brick front extended a foot or two above the roof behind it. A few of the weapons in the store could chop away the brick protective wall — if there was time, which there would not be.

  If the armed force outside had grenades or tear gas the Phoenix trio's odds for survival were highly unfavorable.

  Katz let his eyes sweep the room. Spotting what he wanted, he moved away from cover to reach a cabinet under the gun displays. Enemy bullets pocked the cabinets, then went wild as Manning returned fire.

  "Here, use these." With that, Katz rolled a string of old-fashioned fragmentation grenades across the floor.

  Manning pulled a pin and tried to find a position on the floor from which he could lob a grenade across the wide street. An overhand toss exploded in the far gutter. It may have made the enemy duck, but it left the tavern unscathed.

  "I gotta stand up to make it," Manning said without confidence. He feared he could not stand long enough to throw.

  "Suicide," Katz said.

  "You got that right."

  "Then get up and throw when I yell."

  "Why?"

  "Trust me."

  Katz collected four grenades, palmed one, released the pin and threw it into the street. From his position he could get no more than halfway. But heads on both sides ducked as shrapnel screamed simultaneously into the tavern and the gun shop.

  He followed it with another and another, then hesitated, giving the enemy a chance to raise their heads to see if more was to follow.

  Katz flung the remaining grenade, and every head took cover, including that of Gary Manning.

  "Go!" Katz yelled.

  "What? Now?"

  "Now."

  With a sense of finality and feeling the danger every bit, Manning stood up, his body exposed from his waist to the top of his head. To the sharpshooters across the street, he was a perfect target.

  He pulled the pin and let the handle fly. Ticking off a couple of beats, he fixed his eyes on the one Katz had thrown. It would go off in milliseconds, and he would still be standing.

  Unlike the Russians across the street, he ignored the all-powerful urge to seek cover.

  "Throw," Katz told him.

  Manning was cutting the time too close.

  The unexploded grenade Katz had thrown would keep the enemy down just long enough for them to figure they had been duped, ten to fifteen seconds at the most.

  "Throw!" Katz yelled again.

  Manning threw. The explosion caught three Russians who were poking their heads up to see why the other grenade had not popped.

  They got no more chances in this life to be curious or anything else.

  Now every head was down across the street, and Manning was throwing the powerful eggs one after another.

  Katz fed him from a cache of M-59 fragmentation grenades.

  It was like the Fourth of July in the tavern. Men leaped from the roof as the building collapsed with a creaking and crashing.

  Taking advantage of the lull, Katz made a dash for the light switch, knowing that the darker it was, the better off they were.

  Manning took a breather and thought that he needed a strategic overview of the situation.

  "Okay, Katz, you're the brains. What have we stumbled into?"

  "A school for spies, saboteurs and agitators. They must bring in agents who are already fluent in English and make them live here until they can fit smoothly into American society."

  "Why did they call it Cheyenne?"

  "Cheyenne used to have a lot of missiles and control elements nearby. Still does. With luck, graduates from here can work their way into the defense system."

  "But where is the urgency?"

  Katz shook his head. "I don't know why, but I trust that CIA kid. He apparently died to get his warning through. I think we're sitting on a nuke. Whatever it is, we'd better break it up."

  "How?"

  Katz shrugged. "As I see it, we've got to level the town and annihilate all the inhabitants."

  "But that's impossible."

  In the dark Yakov Katzenelenbogen sighed. "We can try. We have to try, anyway, because we don't have much choice."

  6

  In the Yalta hotel room, Rafael Encizo paced the floor the way he had in Fidel Castro's prison. In the dank Cuban cell, he had made three stretching strides forward, sharply about-faced, and retraced his steps hour upon determined hour of endurance-building exercise.

  When he hadn't been walking, he did sit-ups or push-ups. At night he'd ground away at the wall beneath his bed with a wire coil from the springs. He'd timed and studied every routine of the vicious guards and the other prisoners.

  Encizo had known through every waking minute of his long confinement at Principe prison that eventually he would escape. He would dig his way out. Or he would overpower a guard and dodge through automatic rifle fire spraying from the prison walls and guard towers. He was determined to succeed or die while trying.

  To condition himself, he ran in place every other day until he dropped. He would be in perfect shape and with well-developed endurance when the chance came to escape.

  And it did. Finally after surviving gunfire, starvation, and shark attack, he lurched onto American soil and sucked in freedom like a man cut free of the hangman's noose.

  That was why Phoenix Force appealed to him. It was a "can do, will do" organization. While he could not fight Fidel Castro directly, he could strike at other dictators and cruel madmen with the same monstrous mindset.

  Equally important, he rarely had to stay inactive or holed up in a room for any length of time.

  Tonight he felt imprisoned again. The magnificently appointed suite was as good as a cell of steel and reinforced concrete.

  Under orders to wait until Katz and the two others returned or were not back by the preset deadline, he paced and fidgeted impatiently.

  "Madre de Dios," he muttered when he checked his waterproof, shockproof, non-light-emitting watch. "They should be back by now."

  He held the electronic piece to his ear as if he could hear it ticking away the minutes.

  He ran his hand nervously through his hair and tried to keep his deep brown eyes from darting nervously around the room.

  Hal Brognola's edict that the team members would carry no weapons whatsoever added to the tension. Encizo felt naked. His clothes, though, were more chic than he normally wore because the commander at Stony Man Farm had bought everything for all five men. It was his way of emphasizing that he did not want any objects carried into Russia that could be converted to offensive or defensive use by his highly innovative troops.

  "Relax," Calvin Thomas James said from the far bed where he lay with his fingers laced behind his head.

&
nbsp; "They aren't even due back for another twenty minutes."

  The handsome black with the pencil-thin mustache had forced himself to relax. He used biofeedback techniques he had learned while he was working for his black belt in tae kwon do.

  "Remember what McCarter said about this mission," James suggested.

  Encizo shoved his hands deep into his pockets and frowned. "Yeah. He called it a 'bloody cakewalk. That's what an English mercenary said about the Bay of Pigs. With the United States back of us, training us in advanced guerrilla tactics at Fort Meade, and all, how could Castro hold out against counterrevolutionaries like us? And look how that turned out."

  The ill-fated invasion of Cuba by refugees from Castro's Communist regime was never far from Encizo's thoughts. "El Sargento. That's what we called Batista, the 'little sergeant' who became a dictator. So I helped Castro overthrow him. Can you believe that? I really believed in Fidel. And what happens? He's a Communist. The only difference is a Communist dictator owns it all. You work for him or you don't eat."

  "So you went back in the Bay of Pigs fiasco to throw Castro out. And spent a decade in prison when President Kennedy didn't come through with air cover."

  "I'm going back someday. Someday I'll get another shot at Fidel. Meanwhile, I'm practicing on all the other scum in the world."

  He stopped pacing.

  The prison-induced claustrophobia struck again, here in a luxurious, spacious hotel suite. It occurred often when he was in a Communist country.

  "We should go after Katz and the guys. Right now."

  The lanky Calvin James left the bed and stood before the mirror above the sink. He studied his own high cheekbones and decided he needed a shave. He plugged in the adaptable electric razor. Its contented buzzing infuriated the Cuban.

  "How can you shave now? Turn it off. We might not hear the telephone ring."

  James smiled at his friend's irritation and finished as quickly as he could.

  A knock at the door startled Encizo into action. "That'll be them," he said, approaching the door with a relieved look on his face.