Sensor Sweep

by Don Pendleton

  The men set off with Blancanales on point, Schwarz in the center and Lyons on rear guard. The numbers were ticking off, and it wouldn’t be long before the missile was in position. Lyons had read up on the effects of the chemical they believed the terrorists were planning to use, and it scared the hell out of him. All three of them were carrying high-dose vials of atropine in their satchels, along with Nuclear, Biological and Chemical—NBC—masks. According to their medical experts, they had to be most concerned with a respiratory exposure since it would take an unusually large quantity of the chemical to be absorbed through the skin enough to prove fatal.

  The warriors continued through the bowels of the freighter, keeping their weapons trained on the area ahead, Lyons checking for rear action periodically. Obviously the terrorists were preoccupied with the impending launch and too busy to be searching out Able Team.

  With Schwarz guiding their movements, Blancanales led them down the corridors and they descended several flights of steps before eventually reaching the lowest deck. From that point they would enter the cargo area at its base and by that time they would probably have only a few minutes at most to put a stop to the launch. At some point during their trek the thrumming noise ceased. They pressed onward, more determined than ever to make sure the missile didn’t get off the ship. As they neared the turn that would take them down the corridor and into the cargo bay, Blancanales halted and the three men took to a knee.

  “We’re only going to get one shot at this,” Blancanales said. “How do you want to do it?”

  Lyons considered it a moment, then said, “Gadgets will go for the controls to the pad. He’s the one most likely to understand them. They’ll probably be well guarded, so you and I are going to have to run interference. We’ll go through the door first and clear out the hardforce.” He looked at Schwarz. “That should give you enough room to get to the controls and do your magic. Questions?”

  There were none.

  “All right, boys,” Lyons said. “Let’s nut up and do it.”

  Lyons and Blancanales rounded the corner and trotted toward the hatchway. They could only hope it wasn’t barred from the inside. Provided they’d created enough of a distraction for the terrorists, the Qibla gunners probably wouldn’t have noticed the door being secure or not. All focus would now be on getting the missile launched, and nobody would have likely worried about one little detail like that.

  Lyons reached forward and moved the circular hatch lock. It turned freely—their luck had held out. He put a quick spin on the door wheel, then yanked the release handle. The door swung inward, and on a three-count the two Able Team warriors went through the door, weapons held at the ready. Four surprised terrorists to their right were in no position to react to the battle-hardened speed and accuracy of the Able Team pair.

  Lyons made a beeline for the left side, triggering his MP-5s on the run. The first series of 9 mm Parabellum rounds ripped holes in one terrorist’s stomach and slammed him into a support beam. A second terrorist fell in a similar manner, coughing blood as the round perforated his trachea and lungs. The man dropped to his knees and fell face-first to the deck.

  Blancanales took the other pair with a low, sustained burst from the M-16. The 5.56 mm rounds chopped the legs from under both terrorists, ripping out knees and thighs and shattering leg bones. As the sounds of fire died, Lyons heard movement to his right flank. He spun and went low but held off the triggers as he watched Schwarz emerge through the door and dispatch a terrorist with a short burst from his SIG 551. The terrorist had been hiding in the shadows and thought to sneak up on Lyons.

  Schwarz tossed his friend a salute, then sprinted for the control panel on the other side of the launch pad. There were no more terrorists visible in the cargo bay, which didn’t seem good to Lyons’s way of thinking. The rest had been cleared out, with only a small force left behind to guard the missile from sabotage. Steam had already begun to spit from the base of the missile, pouring forth in pressurized bursts.

  Schwarz joined his teammates a minute later. “I can’t stop it!”

  “What do you mean, you can’t stop it?” Lyons asked, already knowing what the answer would be and wishing he was anywhere but here at the moment.

  “They’ve locked me out of the system. They must have triggered it from a remote station.”

  “Or the bridge,” Blancanales suggested.

  It was better than nothing. “Come on, we’ll try that!” Lyons said.

  “I don’t think it’s going to matter now,” Schwarz said, looking up at the bottom of the launch pad, which towered above their heads.

  As if on cue, the corridor began to rumble and a thunderous noise began building in their ears. The missile was firing, which meant the Able Team trio had all of about ten seconds to get out of the way before the ignition incinerated them.

  “We’ve got about ten seconds before this entire area is filled with superheated gases!” Schwarz said.

  “Move!” Lyons ordered.

  The three men rushed for the hatch they had come through, what they knew would be their only chance for survival. There was no safe spot anywhere in the chamber. Even if they weren’t exposed directly to the accelerant they could sure as hell be scalded to death by the high-pressure carbon dioxide sprayed from high-pressure ports to cool the launch pad and bay.

  As the three men dived through the hatch one behind the other, the corridor shook with a frightening force and the noise was deafening in the combined space. Lyons threw his good shoulder against the hatch, spun the wheel to seal it and threw the hatch for good measure.

  Schwarz scrambled to his feet, and as he went into motion he warned his partners to get away from the door. He didn’t have to tell Lyons twice. Even with the hatch sealed, the pressure was enough that it could still blow the door and turn it into a deadly missile with enough force to crush them. They continued sprinting until they were a safe distance. The three men threw themselves to the deck, sweat soaking their hair and blacksuits.

  Schwarz and Blancanales panted with the exertion, but Lyons just sat with his back against the wall in stony silence. As all three of them exchanged glances, they could hear the missile lifting from the pad and the deafening noises in the sealed corridor began to dissipate. They didn’t want to say it; nobody needed to say it. The terrorists had succeeded in launching the missile, and Able Team had proved ineffective in stopping them.

  “We’ve got a failsafe,” Schwarz finally said when he caught his breath.

  Lyons looked at him tiredly. “Send the signal, Wizard.”

  Schwarz reached to his belt and retrieved a small black box with a hinged door. He snapped a small plastic lock from the box to break the seal, extended an antenna set into the top of it, opened the hinged door and pressed a single orange button inside. The little device was the brainchild of Huntington Wethers. At that moment it was designed to send a special frequency coded only to be receivable by the Stony Man satellite. That signal would then bounce to the Stony Man computers and initiate a sequence to alert Brognola that it was red-phone time.

  “It’s done,” Schwarz said, closing the antenna slowly and purposefully.

  “Yeah,” Lyons murmured. He couldn’t help but feel disheartened. “I guess it’s in the hands of the Air Force now.”

  “What’s wrong with you, Carl?” Blancanales asked, immediately noticing his friend’s demeanor.

  Lyons stared blankly at him before replying, “I made a promise to Hal that we’d stop this thing. Now, because I couldn’t do my job, a hell of a lot of Americans might die today, all because I failed.”

  “You didn’t fail anything, my friend. If there was any failure, we all contributed to it. Our flyboys there in Florida are the best in the world. They’ll put that missile down, you wait and see.”

  “Snap out of it, Ironman,” Schwarz added. “We’ve got a freighter full of terrorists to stop.”

  A very hard and very dangerous expression crossed Lyons’s face.

 
; “Uh-oh,” Blancanales said. “I’ve seen that look before and it’s never good.”

  “Yeah,” Schwarz replied quietly, watching their friend ramp up into berserker mode. “I totally agree with you.”

  “I don’t know about you two, but I’ve had enough of these bastards,” Lyons said so softly that his friends cocked their heads to hear what he was saying. “If a lot of innocent Americans die today, then there’ll be an equal number of the enemy going down with them. So, yeah, Gadgets, you’re right. We still have a boatload of terrorists to kill and I say we get to it.”

  With the snap of his wrists, Lyons brought the MP-5s into readiness. His teammates slowly got to their feet. They were instilled by the confidence and fury of their friend and they began to psyche themselves up in the same way. If the Qibla terrorists tried to take their lives, that was one thing; they had signed up for that possibility. But the thousands of Americans they threatened were just ordinary people who went about their ordinary ways. They hadn’t done anything to anyone; they were just trying to make it in a hard, cold world.

  “I’m with you,” Blancanales said, slamming a fresh grenade into the M-203.

  “Ditto,” Schwarz added, jacking the slide on the SIG 551 following a magazine changeout.

  Lyons whirled and went to the door. He touched it to insure it was cool, then spun the handle and opened the hatch. He walked purposefully across the launch pad, obscured by the smoke left in the wake of the missile’s departure. He could hear the cheers of the terrorists on the deck above. They were about to pay dearly for that cheering. Lyons hoped they were enjoying themselves, having a good time and patting one another on the back, because he and his two friends were about to send them to hell.

  Lyons reached a stairwell that stretched from the bottom of the cargo hold to the lip of the top deck. He took the stairs three at a time, his teammates close on his heels. The terrorists were still shouting and congratulating one another when the Able Team leader emerged from the smoke and steam. A dozen or so gunners stood directly in his path. Lyons raised the pair of machine pistols and squeezed the triggers, crossing his arms over one another as he laid down a barrage of murderous rage in the form of a 9 mm Parabellum hailstorm. Some of the terrorists turned in surprise while others simply dropped to the deck instantly, dead from the lead onslaught. One foolishly charged Lyons and took a swift kick to the groin followed by a controlled SMG burst to the head.

  Blancanales and Schwarz emerged from the pit to take flanking positions. Schwarz leveled the Beretta at a group of five terrorists who had watched the missile launch. The SIG 551 spit a vicious fusillade of 5.56 mm NATO rounds, cutting through the bellies and arms of the terror-mongers before even those who were armed could bring their weapons to bear.

  Blancanales began his offensive by flipping out the rangefinder sight of the M-203, acquiring the center window of the bridge as his target, and squeezing the trigger. The over-and-under kicked against his shoulder but he didn’t appear to feel it. The HE round arced gracefully through the air and landed just below and to the right of the center window frame. The bridge exploded in a fiery orange display of expended RDX and TNT. He slammed home a second round, this one incendiary, and fired it through the gaping crater left in the front of the bridge tower by the first grenade. Screams of pain could be heard as the grenade exploded in a showery spray of bright white molten metal.

  On a roll, Blancanales leveled the M-16 to take out two terrorists he spotted charging through the smoke, their rifles up and ready. He discharged the weapon on a full-auto burn and smoked both of them. One danced an odd pirouette before falling into the cargo hold, his body bouncing off the edge of the launch pad before continuing into the blackened abyss below. The other took at least half a dozen 5.56 mm rounds in the chest and was thrown against a railing. His heart exploded from the impact as the rounds turned the better part of his chest cavity into little more than a bloody pulp.

  Lyons slung the two machine pistols, then rolled from where he stood in time to avoid being shot through the ribs by a terrorist charging him with an Uzi blazing on full auto. He came out of the roll while simultaneously drawing his.357 Magnum Colt Python from shoulder leather. Lyons drew a bead and squeezed the trigger twice. Both skull-busting slugs smashed through the terrorist’s head, blowing it apart like a cantaloupe under the force of a sledgehammer.

  A group of screaming fanatics charged their position from the far end of the ship, maybe a dozen with weapons blazing. The three men went prone, Lyons and Gadgets laying out a covering fire while Blancanales popped another round into the launcher. He triggered the M-203 and watched as it did its nasty work. The grenade struck the chest of one of the terrorists who was apparently leading the charge, and the aftereffects were devastating. The explosive force blew him apart, spontaneously separating all four of his appendages, while the blast sent shockwaves through those near his position. Eardrums broke, eyes popped from sockets and a number of the terrorists went down with their clothes on fire.

  The few terrorists still alive were thrown to the deck. Lyons and Schwarz made short work of them, both delivering killshots that kept the gunners down permanently.

  Silence. Smoke and steam continued to sweep across the deck and the smell of burned human flesh was in the air as small fires consumed the flesh and blood and bone of dead bodies. The Able Team trio waited nearly a full minute for further threats to appear, but none did. They were getting to their feet when a sound somewhere from behind and below them caused all to turn with freshly charged weapons ready for more. The buzz of an outboard engine defied them as it faded, and the trio watched as a boat raced in the direction of Cancun. Someone was escaping from the freighter, most likely the terrorist leader responsible for this atrocity and perhaps even for the launching of the missile.

  “Uh-uh!” Lyons turned and sprinted for the motor launch they had left tied at the freighter aft. He called over his shoulder, “There’s no way I’m letting anyone get away!”

  And before either of his partners could offer any kind of sensible protest, Carl Lyons was diving over the aft railing of the freighter.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Bay of Biscay, North Atlantic

  Rafael Encizo had undergone too many near-death experiences to say that he still saw his life flash before his eyes.

  But the flashes he had expected to see milliseconds before the terrorist’s bullets smashed through his mortal body never came…at least, not in the way he expected. Instead, the flashes of light he saw were sparks ricocheting off the iron edge of the freighter deck, then shooting upward to punch into the terrorist’s form. The terrorist’s body went into convulsions as chunks of flesh were ripped away from his torso. The dance ended with his head exploding a gory spray of blood and gray matter.

  The roar of a chopper zipping past overhead filled Encizo’s ears and the Cuban barely had time to catch a glimpse of the familiar symbol of the British flag before the chopper disappeared from view. He shook his head, not sure what had really happened but glad that it had, and continued to follow his teammates up the exterior ladder rungs set into the freighter’s side.

  By the time Encizo had reached the lip of the freighter, the battle had already been joined by his colleagues.

  McCarter raised his MP-5 and cut a corkscrew burst through a nearby trio of terrorists apparently more intent on cutting him down than on planning for their own survival. Above the din of the hot zone came the unforgettable sound of the FN-FAL as Manning rocked the terrorists’ world all along the deck of the freighter.

  The Cuban was carrying the latest variant of the FNFAL known as the FNC. It worked on the same design principles of the FN-FAL battle rifle, but was more compact and durable than its predecessor. It also came with a 3-round burst capacity and because of its size and compactness was occasionally misclassified by some experts as an SMG rather than an assault rifle.

  Encizo knelt and helped his teammates clear the deck. He dispatched two hardmen immediately bu
t was then distracted by a round buzzing near his ear. Encizo’s eyes roamed across the deck but he didn’t see the source of the shooting. He let his gaze move upward and found the targets: two terrorists firing from the catwalk encircling the bridge tower.

  Encizo rotated the stock of the FNC into an open and locked position, then lifted the rifle to his shoulder. He aligned target number one in the tritium-painted iron sights and squeezed the trigger. The 5.56 mm NATO round punched through the terrorist’s jaw and ripped away the better part of his lower face. His head snapped backward and the impact slammed him against the front of a bridge window.

  Encizo swung the muzzle onto number two, took a deep breath and let half out before firing. The round had to have dropped, because it struck the stock of the weapon, then ricocheted and lodged in the gunner’s shoulder. The terrorist dropped his rifle to the deck below as he stood and grabbed his shoulder, turning with his back exposed. Encizo triggered the weapon again and put a bullet through the center of the terrorist’s spine. The man stumbled back and tumbled over the railing, landing on the deck and coming to a stop within just inches of his weapon.

  Encizo turned to Manning. He gestured in the general area of where the missile was being kept. “Go! We’ll cover you!”

  The big Canadian nodded, dropped another terrorist coming at him from the left, then burst from his spot and headed for the nearest hatchway that would lead him belowdecks.

  As the little Cuban watched him go, the buzzing of chopper blades began to grow louder. Encizo turned and looked until he spotted the chopper. It was a Lynx MK 8, the same kind that had saved his hide less than a minute earlier, and it looked as if the pilot was about to make another pass. Encizo whirled to locate McCarter and shouted a warning for him to get down, waving in the direction of the chopper.

  The fox-faced Briton tossed him a salute before hitting the deck. Encizo joined him and pressed his face tightly against the cold iron plating. The terrorists thought their enemies were surrendering, and they were apparently oblivious to their surroundings. A number of them broke cover and rushed to take their prey, paying no heed that a chopper was bearing down on them. The results were disastrous as the 30 mm chain gun aboard the chopper sounded. Heavy-caliber rounds covered the deck like a plague of locusts and decimated every terrorist in the open and unlucky enough to come under the effective gunnery of Her Majesty’s finest rotary wing pilots.