by Gar Wilson
"No. No. No. How often must I explain? This is a highly sensitive project. A stranger entering our area by mistake can be eliminated or otherwise distracted from recognizing what we do here. But we cannot bury soldiers or police forces without attracting attention."
"You are afraid," she said with amusement, "that your superiors will learn of this incursion."
Afraid you will report me too soon, Vulcan told himself.
"I will let them hear after we have left on our next mission. There are a few in high places who might panic when they hear about this incident and try to delay us. And an opportunity like the one we have now will never occur again." He paused to think before he continued. "No one in the Politburo would want me to allow three hooligans to interfere with my work, if they knew what an opportunity it is."
"Are they hooligans or a CIA suicide team?"
"What will it matter? They will be dead or in our custody soon."
Vulcan was in control of himself again. Cool, confident, a man of authority, he surveyed the situation. Only a handful of his men were still firing into the miniature fort held by the mysterious strangers. And those few were hiding behind buildings and other protective cover.
"Where is everyone else? Are the cowards in hiding?"
Colin Edge said, "They await your orders."
"Get fifty well-armed men. Cover front and back."
"Yes, sir."
Edge raised his hand as if to salute, catching himself just in time. Vulcan often went into rages when someone forgot details such as American civilians not saluting their superiors.
When he was gone, Ann said thoughtfully, "Fifty men against three, and one of them a cripple."
"Cripple?"
"I told you that one of them has lost an arm. He wears a device in its place."
When she had first mentioned that, the possible significance had not stirred Vulcan's thinking. "If you shared my lines to top espionage computer data, you would know there is a five-man American team, led by a one-armed man, that has been known to strike key targets and escape from incredible circumstances."
"There are only three. I am certain of that."
"Hmm. Possibly two more are about somewhere. If these are the men I think they are, we may suffer greater losses than I expected. Go find Colin. Have him put a nunarea men into the assault. And arm yourself," he told her before stepping back into the church.
Alone, he pondered. Were the men cornered in the gun shop part of the five-man team? They had a name although his superiors had never told him. The assault force was an embarrassment to government security forces everywhere. No one wanted to admit it existed.
They were a myth, he had been told once.
He smiled.
What if he could wipe out three, perhaps all five, of the legendary group? Or capture one?
Yes, he hoped these were the men. He might knock off years in his drive to reach membership in the Politburo.
His ego soared to new heights.
And… ah… he would order his people to take one of the enemy alive. He would take the survivor to his superiors and insist upon being present during the interrogation. What a chance, he thought, highly stimulated by the possibilities. He felt young again.
9
Katz, we got trouble back here," David McCarter said, leaving his post by the rear door of the gun shop long enough to gain his field leader's attention.
After nearly a half hour of firing powerful handguns indoors before they had time to put on ear protectors, none of the three was hearing well. Having heard the call, though, Katz moved into the rear room. He was careful to remain in the shadows, but even then a heavy-caliber bullet hissed past his head and whacked into the wallboard.
"Sharpshooter," he told the Englishman. "Is he giving you trouble?"
McCarter, using heavy packing crates for fortification, shook his head.
"He's in the tree near the fence. I'm going to get him the next time I see another target in that direction. No sense exposing myself twice when I can kill two bird brains with one volley. It's out there I'm worried about."
He pointed at the ranch-style homes backed against the alley that separated the business district from residential. Alleys also separated houses in the other blocks of homes.
At first Katz did not understand what McCarter was talking about.
He could have asked, but McCarter was a little crazy. He obviously wanted Katz to see for himself.
He saw the problem, although the only giveaway was an occasional flash of color, illuminated by streetlights two full blocks away. Dozens, maybe a hundred men, Katz estimated, were darting across the open spaces between the houses.
"They're bringing in more men for the finish," Katz remarked.
"I can get a few of them even at this range," McCarter said. "They're counting three before they send each man across that gap between the houses. I could get maybe four or five before they realize I can count, too."
"That's like putting your Finger in the ocean instead of the dike," Katz observed. "But do it, anyway. If I don't figure a way out of this trap soon, we might as well take as many of them with us as possible."
McCarter carefully rose above his barricade and triggered the FAL that he was using at the moment. He fired before he saw one of the enemy actually break from behind the one house and attempt to dash to the next wall of cover. He was dead before he even thought he was exposed.
"See," McCarter crowed. "I'll let a couple more cross to be sure they're in the same cadence again before I wipe another one."
Katz sighed. "It doesn't matter much, does it?"
"What?"
McCarter was genuinely surprised. He was thinking only of body count. It kept his mind off the real problem.
"If you kill a third of them," Katz explained, "there'll still be seventy of them pouring lead through that door."
Already the door was nonfunctional. It hung open from one hinge. There was no closing it even if either side had wanted to.
"And if you stack up the other bodies like a cord of wood, they'd just bring in replacements."
McCarter's mind flicked to another worry. "If they throw a grenade in here, I'll just toss it back."
'They don't have grenades." Katz was thinking aloud. Against targets trapped inside a building, the weapon of choice would have been rifle grenades or a recoilless weapon with lots of bang. Or tear gas.
Or… he began to think of other possibilities. He raised one of the rifles McCarter had lined up neatly behind his barricade. McCarter, a sort of social misfit, had dedicated his life to learning every firearm as well as other lethal weapons. No doubt he was looking forward to testing each of the guns in living color. Besides, he did not have to reload when the Russians charged.
Katz picked up the Night-Eye binoculars lying near the weapons. He watched the place between the two houses and saw that the enemy consisted of civilians.
"We have to break out of this place. You just hold this end of the fort," Katz said. "I've got an idea."
He waited, then darted across an open space to the front, while McCarter calmly took aim and took out the sniper in the tree.
Halfway to the front room, Katz heard his name called again, this time by Gary Manning. He echoed David McCarter.
"We got big trouble here, Katz. Real big trouble."
He pointed to the right of the demolished tavern. The lights were off in the jewelry store, but there was enough illumination to see movement inside.
"And over there and there, too."
The story was the same in the dress shops and the adjoining shoe store.
Even as they watched, a number of men, in different configurations, tried to get closer.
Gary Manning aimed the M-16 A-1 rifle he had selected when he last ran out of ammunition for another weapon. With the Rock Island arsenal model, he led the enemy and began firing.
Manning looked pleased with himself, but Katz was indifferent and summed up the situation. "It doesn't matter. If they
want to take the time, all they have to do is send a squad far enough up the street and then come straight through the lot to our wall."
"Meaning?"
"We can't stay here."
Manning was puzzled. "You mean we leave our own ammunition supply?"
"They'll get us eventually if we stay, no matter how many of them we kill first."
"Get us eventually? I thought that was a 'given. There's no way we can get out of this alive."
Katz was emphatic. "We've stumbled onto a major KGB installation, a way of pouring exquisitely trained agents into the West. We have to get out of this alive. They are not calling in outside help, to maintain secrecy, and that gives us a slight chance. Not much, but it's better than nothing. And we have always achieved a 'must. "
Manning looked skeptical. "Unfortunately we are about to break the string. We aren't getting out of this alive unless we surrender and, frankly, that's one thing I refuse to do."
Before he finished speaking, jacketed wad cutters began tearing up the rifles and shotguns that remained on the wall racks.
"Keep shooting," he told Manning. "Go wild whether you hit anybody or not. I need cover."
"My pleasure."
As the front of the gun shop became a steady stream of yard-long spears of fire from Manning's cache of weapons, Katz picked up another M-16 with a 40-round magazine and began stuffing his belt with assorted handguns and collected a cache of fully automatic rifles.
When he needed to move without crawling, he directed McCarter to put up a main line of resistance to match the frantic barrage Gary was spewing from the front of the store.
"You're on," McCarter called cheerfully from the rear. "Nobody's going to move out back until I'm out of ammo."
With more freedom of movement, Katz piled heavy wooden crates to form a U-shaped bunker along the wall shared with the supermarket.
He quickly pulled two grenade pins, dropped the hand-held bombs into the hole formed by the boxes, then leaped behind a sturdy counter. Manning ducked, too.
Despite the shooter's earmuffs they all wore, the twin explosions hammered them with a percussion effect, and the air filled with flying debris. A blinding cloud of dust billowed from the rubble. Briefly the battle fell into a lull as the men outside waited to see if some catastrophic explosion had done their job for them.
When he saw the hole in the wall and the grocery shelves beyond, Katz grabbed his stash of hoarded weapons and tossed them through the hole.
The attackers decided to become bolder, perhaps because they had taken the explosion as an encouraging sign. A few even came into the open. Some of them moved from cover, but neither Manning nor McCarter opened fire again until they had at least ten of the enemy in sight.
When the timing was right, they decked more than a dozen attackers and made the remainder more cautious. The Russians would take time to regroup, which gave a brief spell of time in which to make a move.
"Manning, McCarter, this way," Katz said as he climbed through the hole into the supermarket.
His plan was practically the equivalent of Russian roulette. He hoped to set the gun shop on fire and concentrate the opposition's attention on that while he and his partners broke out of the supermarket.
He had no plan for what they would do after they were in the open, but he knew his objectives: get one of them free and on the way to a Russian border. That person would alert Hal Brognola of the existence of Cheyenne, USSR. The two who remained behind would destroy as much of the town as possible.
Complications erupted the moment all three of them were inside the supermarket. Without warning, the west wall of the gun shop burst like a huge shell. Chunks of brick shrapnel stung the Phoenix Force detachment, and jagged slivers of studs and wallboard punctured their flesh.
When the wreckage settled, Katz could see the hood of a car, opened like a gaping jaw reacting to surprise. Obviously the car had been rammed against the wall.
A stunned driver crawled out of the wreckage, and Katz finished him with a short burst. The other Russians who were trying to get through the hole were an easy mark for Katz. As he trained his weapon on them he told Manning to get an armload of matches.
While Manning searched the aisles, gunfire from the gun shop was turning the supermarket into a shambles with dustings of flour and sugar and the rainlike effect of bottles cracking open.
Manning made his way back and dumped the matches around Katz.
"Head for the far front window," Katz directed. "Go through it the moment the fireworks begin back here."
Left alone, Katz fired a few more times, but he couldn't hope to hold off the enemy much longer.
"That's it, friends," Katz said to the invaders. "Come for the honey."
He lit one match and dropped it in the box he held in his hand. When the box ignited, Katz tossed it through the hole in the wall and toward the gunpowder display. He kept throwing the flaming matchboxes until his sense of timing told him to run.
He was at the front of the store when the gun shop went up. It blew in five directions, every way except down.
The common wall between the supermarket and the gun shop bulged, then collapsed, bringing down with it a quarter of the roof that battered Katz and nearly pinned him beneath its wreckage.
The front and rear of the gun shop sent out huge shafts of flame that consumed any Russian within range.
Blinded, choked by the powdered plaster, Katz scrambled straight through the hole in the front glass. The opening was there, just as he had expected.
Suddenly he was outside and found himself sprinting just behind Manning and McCarter.
They headed for the residential section before even one of the Russians spotted them.
As he rounded the first house and had cover to his back, Katz slowed. We've made it this far, he thought, then had to share his exultation with the others. "Gary, David, we did it. We're outside."
The pair stopped ahead of him, gasping for breath. They dropped their guns and bent over with their hands on their knees. The run from the supermarket had not winded them. It was the tension of the fight.
"And only eight or nine thousand miles from home," McCarter estimated.
Katz felt his enthusiasm waning as he sobered from the effects of the small victory. Obviously the other guys thought the mission was complete. There was another step to take, and he had to set the example. "You two take off. Contact Brognola as soon as you can. I'll stay around here awhile and do a little tidying up."
"You mean burning the town?" McCarter said.
"As much as I can. The place must be ultrasecret for the people here to avoid calling for outside help. So that provides me with an opportunity. I need an extra day or so around here. You two get out of Russia and get home to Stony Man."
Manning got a look on his face that was well-known by Phoenix Force members. He didn't often get to be like that, but when he did it meant that he would dig in his heels and wouldn't budge.
"Nobody is going to leave you here alone," he said.
"Calvin James and Encizo will probably be coming this way," Katz said. "Somebody has to stay here and tell them what happened. They'll give me a hand with the mop-up operation."
McCarter dropped to a sitting position.
In the background the gun shop was still putting on a brilliant display of pyrotechnics. The supermarket was consumed in flames that reached two or three stories in height. Across the street, the jewelry store was burning.
The church was the only building along that section of the street that was not involved.
"We'll tidy up now," McCarter said. "Then we'll all get out of here together."
"Well, I tried," Katz said with a shrug. "If you two insist on being underfoot…" He brightened up optimistically. "It doesn't look all that good, but I've been in as tough spots before, along with you, and managed somehow. There is a way. I'm sure!"
10
Vulcan stuck his head out from between the pews, a position he had taken when the exp
loding gun shop slammed bricks and hunks of debris against the church. Bullets, ignited by the ensuing fire, whomped steel jackets against the siding, but only the largest caliber slugs penetrated the walls.
As the ferocity of the conflagration subsided, he ventured up the aisle and cautiously opened the front door two full inches.
He called for both Ann Cardwell and his principal aide, Colin Edge.
Only Ann appeared, and there was the suggestion of a smirk on her sensuous-looking lips. He felt irritated, and at that moment he hated her. She had been in the streets, shouldering a gun, yet she appeared as cool and carefully groomed as ever.
He was reminded again how much he wanted her in his power, to do with as he wished. Such magnificently horrible things he would do to her, he thought gleefully.
However, his more immediate concern was that she would inform his superiors of the unexpected invasion before he had time to concoct a plausible and acceptable cover story.
That part of Vulcan's strategy involved Colin Edge, who was cutting off all communications to the outside world. He was due to be back at any moment to report on how successfully he'd carried out his task.
During the fighting Vulcan had attempted to draw Ann into the safety of the church, but she insisted upon remaining outside where she directed the fighting. She responded to his order and entered the church only after she had seen the town's fire brigade in action.
"Are the invaders dead?" he asked hopefully. "Did they go up in their own explosion?"
"No. Not all of them, at least."
"Not all?" He was losing his control. "How could anybody survive inside there?"
"They blew up the gun shop as a diversion," she said. "While our people had their heads down, I saw three men escape from the supermarket."
He was getting livid again. "The CIA invaders risk being killed by the explosions while our people cover their heads like the very picture of cowardice," he fumed. "I wish we had such heroic men on our side."
"The invaders, as you call them, had no choice. They could either take the risk of running, or be wiped out for sure."