Lyons flared his chute as the platform flew past beneath his boots, and his landing was perfect. The wind still wanted his airfoil and heaved at it. The Able Team Leader’s anesthetized hand fat-fingered the right hand release. He was yanked off his feet, his oxygen bottle and mask ripping away as the chute dragged him face-first across the platform. Lyons grunted as a vast weight came down between his shoulder blades and pinned him. He saw the glitter of the knife that slashed his shrouds, and Bolan heaved him to his feet and yanked him back behind cover.
“You all right?”
Lyons spit blood and shouted over the howl of the wind. “Yeah! You see T.J. on your way in?”
“Saw him go under! He could have hit the boat dock or the drink!” Bolan unstrapped his Barrett rifle and grenade launcher. “Maybe he ate a pylon or got hung up in the supports! Either way we gotta assume he didn’t make it! The nukes and Akira are probably downstairs, with luck we’ll meet him coming up!”
Lyons unclipped his shotgun from his jump harness. He unfolded the stock and wrapped the hook under his elbow. The rain pounded into his face with the force of needles.
“Let’s go.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Continental Shelf
Calvin James was distracted from his depth gauge inside his helmet by a dim glow in the black depths beneath him. The glow became a constellation of lights, like an upside down Little Dipper, which resolved into the work lights of an underwater construction site. Some of the lights moved as men in ADS suits floated around the rock shelf like men doing a space walk. The bulbous shapes of submersibles hovered over the work area. The light of a cutting torch flickered like a blue sun. The Phoenix Force commando counted eight men in suits and two submersibles. They were outnumbered two to one, but surprise was on their side. Their descent had gone undetected, and the enemy wasn’t looking in their direction. The team had floated down over their targets like undersea angels of death.
Grimaldi blinked the running lights beneath the Deep Flight II’s wings to signal the attack. James unlocked his claw and released the tow bar. He hit his thruster module and began flying toward his target under his own power. He could feel rather than see or hear Blancanales flying wingman on his left. The Deep Flight slid forward like a slow-motion fighter plane as Grimaldi began his attack run. The enemy submersible looked like a goldfish bowl surrounded by a steel frame. Oxygen tanks and thrusters hung on its framework like afterthoughts. Four massive manipulator arms sprung from its chin like the steel tentacles of a squid. Two men in warm-up suits sat inside the glass bubble, their bodies looking miniature and distorted through the thick plastic. The submersible’s manipulator arms held a pallet loaded with six sealed metal cylinders. James could only assume the thermonuclear demolition charges had been repackaged for deep ocean delivery. The two men inside the bubble looked up in shock as Grimaldi loomed in out of the gloom and slid to a stop. One of the Deep Flight’s arms extended as the submersibles came almost nose-to-nose.
The two men in the submersible stared in horror at the RKG-M antitank grenade adhered to the side of their compartment. Grimaldi reversed his screws and backed away from the submersible. The men inside the sphere screamed and worked their controls. The submersible tilted as the nuke-laden pallet dropped, and a manipulator arm reached up with aching slowness to rip away the grenade.
The two screaming men were eclipsed with white fire as the shaped-charge warhead burned through the plastic bubble and filled the compartment with superheated gas and molten metal. The fire was instantly extinguished as the Atlantic Ocean’s invisible hand closed around the compromised compartment like a fist and crushed it like an eggshell. The pallet of nukes continued its long slide down into the depths, and the slain submersible followed, trailing bubbles from its ruptured tanks and steam from its molten interior.
Calvin James closed on his target.
Four men in ADS suits hovered around a small platform mounted into the shelf. A drill the size of a Volkswagen slowly turned. A pair of the sealed cases sat on the platform. Nukes ready to be embedded. The three men had turned at the sound of the muffled explosion, but the Deep Flight had already peeled off back into the gloom. One of the men sensed something and slowly turned his suit around.
James closed to three feet and cranked his manipulator claw all the way to the left as he extended his arm. The piston strapped to his forearm spit bubbles and shoved the two-foot metal rail forward. The grenade’s pin pulled and the cotter lever clicked away. In the syrup slowness of their underwater maneuvering James’s warhead and the chest of his opponent’s ADS suit coincided with a clank. James could hear a sound like bacon sizzling as the superheated jet burned through the chest of the ADS suit, the man inside and blasted out the back. The dark water around them flared orange in the glow and the ADS suit spasmed and crumpled in on itself like a tin can being crushed.
Blancanales’s opponent never saw what hit him. The Able Team commando’s grenade locked into the rounded silver hump of the hardsuit’s atmosphere unit and fired. The back of the suit blew open as the oxygen tanks exploded and instantly flattened out, leaving slowly sinking remains like the aftermath of an underwater steamroller accident.
The third man on the platform lunged at James with a thruster-assisted hop. His claws were held in front of him defensively. The plierlike hands of the suit opened like mouths to rip at James’s suit seals. The fourth man took the better part of valor and lifted off the platform in full flight.
The Phoenix Farm warrior leveled his arm and cranked his right claw all the way to the side and the APS underwater assault rifle rattled against its restraining straps. Yellow fire strobed as five-inch steel darts flew from the muzzle in a stream into the enemy hardsuit. James snarled inside his helmet as the darts deflected. It was as he suspected. At this depth the darts didn’t have the velocity to penetrate a hardsuit. He raised his aim into his opponent’s face.
His opponent got his arm underneath James’s and shoved the assault rifle out of line. The man’s claw opened like the mouth of a snake and the steel tips scraped sickeningly against James’s face glass.
Blancanales’s voice crackled over the hydrophone. “Hold him!”
James and his opponent jockeyed for position. The suits were incapable of turning their heads, but the men within got a fish-eye lens view to the sides from the curved glass. James’s man caught a glimpse of Blancanales coming in and pushed away. He turned and hit his thrusters, lifting off and away from the shelf like a man wearing a rocket pack.
The Able Team warrior flew after him, straightening his right arm to aim. Darts hissed in bubbling streams from his APS rifle. The darts wouldn’t penetrate the pressure body of the suit, but Blancanales had other ideas. His darts drew lines into the whirring propellers of his target’s thrusting module. The fleeing man’s hardsuit suddenly listed as his portside thrusters broke and jammed. Pol adjusted his aim and sent his last five darts into the two thrusters starboard. Sparks ticked as the system shorted. The man’s flight into the open ocean slowed and stalled. Blancanales flew in for the kill.
With twenty-five thermonuclear time bombs ticking, there was neither room nor time for mercy in the Stygian depths. Blancanales hit his opponent from behind and drove him out and away from the shelf. The enemy hardsuit didn’t have the mobility to reach backward. Blancanales drove him out a hundred feet away and dropped him.
The IESHEN Group terrorist had only one forward-firing thruster. He hit it for all it was worth as his adversary rose up and away, but all it did was push him in a slow circle as his suit tilted to the side. The crippled suit began a long, slow death spiral into the dark.
James had no time to contemplate the man’s lonely fate. His own thrusters were whining at full power as he flew to the second battle scene. McCarter and Encizo were besieged. The two men were back-to-back and surrounded by enemies. Two crushed hardsuit husks lay on the undersea platform, evidence that the men of Phoenix Force had driven their shaped-charged warheads home.
The enemy had learned the hard way and circled their prey, looking for the opening to pull McCarter and Encizo apart and kill them individually. One of the enemy ADS men held the stuttering, blinding blue light of a cutting torch in his claw. The enemy submersible hovered over the scene defensively. Grimaldi looped and rolled around it, looking for his own opening. One side of the enemy submersible’s steel frame was blackened where he had gotten a near miss with his second grenade. Grimaldi was out of grenades, and his four automatic underwater rifles were useless against the enemy craft. He slowed his thrusters, manipulator arms extended to try to rip away tanks or propellers, but the enemy sub simply spun on its axis defensively, like a crab, presenting its four arms to the Stony Man pilot’s two.
James caught light above and saw another enemy submersible descending. “Jack! Enemy sub on your six!”
Grimaldi hit his thrusters and squirted out from the closing jaws of the trap. McCarter and Encizo were not as lucky. Freed of its opponent, the first sub dropped like an octopus upon its prey. Its four arms reached out, seizing McCarter’s arms while the other two dug into his thrusting modules, the stainless-steel jaws crushing and rending the plastic propellers and motor housings with ease. The submersible rose upward, plucking McCarter out of the fray.
The four enemy hardsuits descended on Encizo like a pack of wolves upon a stray dog.
The back of the Cuban’s helmet blackened as the torch played across it. James plowed into the torch man like an aquatic fullback. Their hardsuits thudded and James drove him out of the melee. The former SEAL began to extend his last grenade for the kill, but the man hit his thrusters expertly and rose and spun at the same time. The piston slammed forward and extended the grenade. James tried to bring it back in line but he was too slow. The grenade flared like a sun as it detonated. With no target to lock against, the superheated jet of the shaped charge shoved him out into open water like a rocket. James blinked at the flashing lights in front of his eyes when something thudded hard into his suit. He tried to tear with his claws, but they slid along the smooth shifting surfaces of the enemy’s suit.
He suddenly found himself face-to-face with Clay Forbes.
Their face shields clanked and James could hear Forbes’s shout through the physical connection. “Gonna drop you, gray meat! Gonna drop you down deep!”
The left side of James’s helmet glass blackened beneath the incandescent blue flame of the torch. The Phoenix Force commando got his right arm up and cranked his claw full right. Forbes’s eyes flew wide as the APS underwater assault rifle spewed six darts into his face. The darts bent and broke, pinging against the glass and barely chipping it.
Forbes’s voice roared over the hydrophone. “Not good enough! Gonna burn you open, bitch! Send your crushed ass down into the cold!”
The flame came forward inexorably toward James’s face. He pulled the sacrifice play and let it come. He let his arm bend into his chest and the torch suddenly shoved forward. As it did, the nozzle of the torch came straight between his claw. The Phoenix Force commando’s face plate blackened, but he ignored the flame and vised his claw down. He turned his hand and the claw rotated it 180 degrees, bending the nozzle all the way back at Forbes.
Forbes leered. There was still a foot between him and the fire. “Cute.”
James clamped his claw down and snipped off the torch’s nozzle.
A three-foot jet of fire enveloped Forbes’s helmet. The tube of acetylene squirted out of his claw and corkscrewed away like a berserk rocket-propelled torpedo. James reversed his thrusters and backed away as contact was broken. He brought up his claws defensively, but the left hand wouldn’t obey him. His manipulator claw had been caught in the acetylene blast and been soldered shut.
Forbes hovered back in. The right side of his helmet was blackened, but the big man’s eyes were on James’s claw, noting the damage. “What’ya think you’re gonna do one-handed?” He rotated his claws, opening and closing them for his adversary’s benefit as he looked for his opening. “Gonna have to open you up the old-fashioned way, rip your seals and let the ocean in and—”
Forbes’s speech was cut short as the jagged line of a crack ran violently down the blackened side of his faceplate. Forbes went slack-jawed with horror. “Jesus, God…”
The big man screamed like a rabbit being killed. A needle-thin stream of the Atlantic hissed into his helmet with a thousand pounds per square inch of force ripping through the flesh of his face like a laser. Forbes’s head whipped back and forth in screaming agony. The stream widened and fanned into his face, ripping the flesh from the skull and blasting out his eyes like a hydraulic mining hose stripping a mountainside. His agony ended abruptly as his faceplate imploded and his stripped skull was crushed. His hardsuit spasmed like a puppet as the chest, arms and legs crumpled inward as all pressure integrity was lost.
The shattered ADS began its slow sink into the gloom, trailing what was left of Clay Forbes in a thin red ribbon of chum.
James wheeled and kicked his thrusters. His team was in a bad way. Grimaldi was in a stalemate dogfight with one of the submersibles. The second sub had pulled up out of the fight and taken McCarter with it. He hung suspended in its embrace, slowly flailing his limbs while the copilot tried to rip him open with the second pair of arms. His suit appeared to be intact, but two of his thrusters had been ripped away. Encizo and Blancanales were in an ADS dog pile on the platform. They were outnumbered two to one, and it would only be moments before their opponents got a good hold on their suit seals and opened them up to the Atlantic.
James chinned his hydrophone. “Jack! Come to me!”
The Deep Flight’s main advantage was speed and maneuverability. Grimaldi pulled his sub into a tight loop and flew to James. His voice clearly said he didn’t like leaving the fray. “Tell me you have a plan!”
“Pick me up! Drop me on top of one of the subs! Then ram the dog pile, break it up! We’ll wing it from there!”
“Roger that!” Grimaldi arced around and slowed as he passed over James.
The Phoenix Force commando reached up with his good claw and clasped the tow bar. “I’m on!”
Grimaldi shoved his throttles forward and shot toward the fray. He flew straight at the sub holding McCarter and pulled up and over it. James released and powered his thrusters down, directly behind the submersible. He maneuvered underneath it. The manipulator arms had McCarter by two arms and one leg. He had his remaining leg jammed up against the sub’s support frame, but he was nearly crucified, and the sub’s fourth arm was blindly raking across his suit, trying to rip him open.
McCarter looked up in his struggles and saw his teammate.
Exterior hydraulic tubes would be crushed at this depth, so the arms on the submersibles were simply skeleton frames operated by cable pulleys.
The ex-SEAL reached up into the manipulator arm control assembly and began snipping cables with his remaining claw. The claws lost all strength, and McCarter fell free of the submersible’s steely embrace.
Grimaldi came around in a tight circle and flew toward the struggling mob of hardsuits. He aimed the nose of his Deep Flight at the back of an ADS that wasn’t pink and shoved his throttles full forward. His ceramic hull hummed and his six-thousand-pound submersible hit the mob at six knots. The hump of his main target’s air and life support buckled, and the rest of the ADS followed suit in explosive decompression. The remaining five men were scattered, two of them being pushed off the platform.
James noted McCarter still had one grenade attached to his arm. He jerked his head toward the battle, and the Briton descended. His teammate clanked his claw against the submersible’s chin. The two operators looked down at James. Both men wore suitably appalled expressions. The ex-SEAL chinned his hydrophone. “Are you receiving me?”
The two men nodded as a unit.
“Good, you are going to set this tub down on the platform.” James opened his good claw and twirled it. “If you don’t, I am going to cripple your motors, cut ope
n your life support, and watch you take the slow train to crush depth. Do we understand one another?”
The two men nodded as a unit.
“Do it slow.”
The pilot grabbed his joysticks and began slowly maneuvering the submersible to an octagonal pad on the platform with an “x” of lights marked on it.
James checked the battle below.
McCarter hovered over a blasted-open hardsuit. Encizo and Blancanales stood shoulder to shoulder forward of him. The two remaining men ADS men hovered in front of them. One began to move toward a rack of tools on the platform.
Grimaldi swung into view and flew straight toward him. The four automatic rifles stuttered fire beneath his stub wings, and 104 five-inch darts streamed into the man’s face-plate. The glass gave beneath the onslaught of steel and his suit ruptured and crumpled. The remaining IESHEN Group hardsuited watched as the craft flew past a foot over his head and peeled off into the darkness doing a victory roll.
The man cut his thrusters, dropped to the platform, clamped his claws shut and put them up in surrender. The enemy sub set down on the pad, and Grimaldi swung back in and came to a hover in front of James. The hydrophone bounced sound against his helmet. “The other sub is ascending. I’m out of grenades and darts. You want me to pursue?”
“No, let him go. Surface ships will pick them up.” James kicked his thrusters and floated in front of the prisoner. “Who are you?”
“Alexsandr Zabyshny.”
James pointed his fused claw at the remnants of broken hardsuits littering the platform. “You want to die?”
The Russian glanced at the crushed carnage and then met James’s gaze as he chinned his hydrophone. “Not today. Not down here.”
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