Phoenix Force 06 - White Hell

by Gar Wilson

  Again Keio and Rafael, McCarter and Manning with them, faded out of sight. Katz maintained vigil outside the nerve center. "Move it," he hissed as they left. "The guards will be changing shifts any minute now."

  They searched, room to room.

  The snick of a latch, a pinprick of searching penlight strafing the gloom, assured that the room was unoccupied. It was as before. Nothing. A glut of bedrolls on the floor, unmade, rumpled beds, all empty. One cubicle, obviously officer country, looked like it had accommodated pigs. But the pigs were gone.

  Tension gradually turned to souring despair, as room after room produced no terrorists, no U.S. troops. They concluded that they had been had.

  They came upon the hardman Keio had killed, but no other bodies. Until they reached the third to last room.

  Encizo stiffened, sucking in a rasping breath as he saw the grisly pileup. "Madre de Dios!" he groaned. "Que cosa?" Instantly Keio crowded in, his light playing over the ghastly, still-life tableau.

  "Filthy, rotten bastards," he said, grimacing. There were three GIs, still in their khakis, sprawled in obscene tangle on the bunks, one on the floor. Their eyes staring, last-moment sup-plication still registering, each lay in a thick puddle of gore, a neat third eye—dark, accusing—in the center of his forehead.

  "Killed in cold blood," McCarter choked as he invaded the cramped space. He growled in barely suppressed rage. "Let's go get 'em. I'll cut out their goddamned hearts!"

  But that grisly discovery was swiftly awarded second place in the shock parade upon entering the adjoining room. There they found another GI, naked this time, his uniform in disarray on the floor. He was tied in spread-eagle position on the cot. Again there was a single bullet hole in his forehead, the pillow beneath him totally saturated with blood and brain slop. Red bruises—vampire kisses—long, sweeping scratches raked his upper torso.

  Scalps tightened. A rain of goose pimples fled across each man's back. Encizo's stomach tilted. "Holy God," he muttered. "I don't even wanna try guessing what this is all about."

  Chilled to their souls, they reported to Katz. When he returned from the grotesque killing pens his face was dark with rage, his eyes dripped hate.

  "The rest of the GIs?" Manning ventured.

  "What do you think?" Katz rasped. "If they killed these poor guys . . ."

  He fell silent, his head bowed. The men could almost hear the wheels turning in his brain. And when he finally looked up he snapped, "Rafael, you and Keio go outside. Get on that roof. Blast out part of that dome, come at them from there. The minute you open up, we'll move in down here. If we can catch them by surprise, there's a chance we can save the Americans."

  "Wilco," Rafael said, immediately working to refasten his jump suit and draw up his parka. The gloves went on; the safety on his Ingram was clicked off. Shortly he and Ohara were padding down the dark corridor.

  "Tear the joint down," McCarter called after them.

  Inside the operational theater, the airmen sat at their consoles, shoulders hunched, expressions abject. The four Grey Dog front-liners still hung loose, joshing quietly among themselves. "There's room," Katz said softly, "if we can just blast them first."

  Each man was turned into a ticking time bomb as he waited for hell to break loose inside the dome. Each yearned for the distinct privilege of being first to cut the terrorist swine to ribbons.

  Just then the world exploded. An Ingram opened up on the roof, a powerhouse heel simultaneously collapsing a section of electrically heated glass. Forty-five caliber slugs rained down, turning desks, computer consoles, radar dishes to junk. The lights in the amphitheater went out momentarily, then flickered back to life.

  By then, submachine guns singing a soul-satisfying death chant, Katz, McCarter and Manning were charging through the doors. They poured hot lead into the stunned enemy as the two fly-boys hit the floor, leaving them unobstructed operating room.

  From above, Ohara and Encizo poured down hot death also.

  With the exception of one guncock, they were all caught flat-footed; they never had time to unholster their .45s.

  McCarter whooped as he took out his man, the Ingram punching a diagonal pattern of red holes across his chest. Keio, from another angle, turned the hardguy's head to mush.

  Manning sent a horizontal line of deathdealers—a quick up-and-down zip—that sliced his man wide, dropping him backward over a nearby desk.

  Katz and Encizo did a job on the third guncock, their slugs hitting him hard, slamming him into a helpless spin. When he finally hit the floor, he was jetting blood like a punctured spaghetti-sauce can.

  "Katz," Encizo's voice somehow carried over the earsplitting din inside the dome, "that guy on the floor. Get him. He's after the GIs."

  The warning came too late. The last Irish work-horse, his shirt awash with blood, was determined to take someone with him.

  Before anyone could put him down for good, the madman had emptied a full clip—seven rounds—to the spot where the airmen huddled in close knot.

  McCarter came over him then. A fresh magazine in his MAC-10, he spilled all thirty rounds into the terrorist, setting his clothing to smoking, irreparably muddling his vital parts in the bargain.

  They went to the GIs immediately. But the dead gunman had done his work well.

  Drained, weary, a crushing sense of defeat upon them, the men of Phoenix Force stood and surveyed the havoc about them. Looking up, they saw snow drifting through the shattered part of the dome.

  Their despair was interrupted by a new rattle of gunfire from outside. A second later Rafael poked his head through the dome. "We've got a live one out here, guys. Drag him in."

  Where the stray Grey Dog had come from no one ever discovered, but within sixty seconds he was inside, clutching a shattered leg, howling in agony, begging for mercy, leaking gore all over the floor.

  "Mercy, is it?" McCarter taunted. "I'll give you mercy." Impatiently Yakov pushed his hotheaded mate away and tied a makeshift tourniquet around the boy's thigh.

  "He was hotfooting it across the parking lot," Encizo explained.

  A fierce smile on his face, the Cuban produced his Mark I and knelt close to the kid, who could not have been more than eighteen. He slid the point of the knife into the boy's left nostril, gave it a delicate twitch, cutting a precise gash in his flesh. "You're gonna tell us everything you know, aren't you?" the Cuban seethed.

  As Yakov began his interrogation, and Rafael continued threatening motions with the Gerber, the terrorist commenced spilling his guts.

  It was as they had thought. The main core of the INLA force—thirty-six in all—had flown the coop. They were on their way to Prudhoe. But before that there would be a series of independent strikes at the pipeline proper. They had gone in one helicopter. Takeoff time had been 2200 hours.

  At that piece of information Katz slapped his forehead softly. "We probably passed them on the way. What about the other Americans?" Yakov demanded. "What about that naked man tied up in one of those rooms?"

  "Outside, Captain," the yellowback babbled, "in the snow. We killed the nine o' them our first night here."

  It took all the control McCarter could master to keep from kicking the simpering swine's head to pudding.

  "And the man you tortured?"

  "That wasn't none o' our doing," he whined. "It was that damned Coletta Devane. She done it."

  Yakov's eyes opened wide. "She? Coletta Devane?"

  "Yeah, Sean Toolan's woman. She's got a queer streak she has. Plain daft. And just lately . . . a regular bitch in heat she's been."

  The men exchanged puzzled, disbelieving glances.

  "McCarter," Katz grunted, after they had pumped the turncoat for every shred of information they could get. "What should we do with him?"

  The kid then reached for his only life hope—a knife in his boot.

  McCarter pressed the Ingram's barrel.

  The weapon bucked just once, leaving a hole big as a half-dollar as it exited the other
side. The terrorist went down. Nobody even bothered to look back as the boy writhed in final death throes.

  Once outside, it took only a few moments to find the makeshift cemetery. And there, protruding from the snow of a compacted drift were at least eight human feet. Piled high, frozen solid, they resembled so many slabs of human meat.

  Keio's lust for revenge threatened to split his brain just then. "Those poor devils."

  Yakov was keying the walkie-talkie, his eyes feverish. "Grimaldi," he barked, the urgency in his tone unmistakable. "Come and get us. Now. As fast as you can make that crate go."

  11

  There was no finesse to Phoenix Force's attack. Suddenly the Bell Long Ranger—transformed into a death-spitting war wagon—was dropping out of the night. They found the Grey Dog demolition team exactly where their ratchet-jawed comrade had said they would be.

  One minute the Irish were operating in arrogant leisure, rigging their charges on a stretch of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline located less than two miles north of pumping station three, the next, amid the booming engine roar, the slap of rotors, the enemy was upon them. They were caught with their pants all the way to their ankles.

  Before the terrorist squad could recover, the copter's spotlight pinned them in a brilliant glare, momentarily blinding them. Then, even as they tumbled off the VSLs and broke for cover, death came calling from the heavens.

  Ohara, McCarter and Manning sat in the Bell's open hatch, their rifles spitting death.

  One Grey Dog lay flopping at the base of a supporting trestle; another caught his death fifty feet to the right. Still another, leaving a bloody smear on the snow, crawled for an enfilade of rock on the pipe's left side.

  Ingrams put aside, Phoenix Force opted for the greater range of the M-16 Keio wielded, the AK-47 McCarter was emptying, the Stoner M-63 that Manning had temporarily coaxed from Rafael. Even if the liberation army troops had had the presence of mind to try blasting the bird from the sky, they were panicked by the nonstop thunder from above, by the flat, slicing chop of hot lead at their heels as they desperately made for the high country.

  Fifty minutes had passed since liftoff at QSS 0022, and now, at 2435 hours, Mack Bolan's ace avengers were coming down.

  At Katzenelenbogen's direction, Grimaldi had beamed a message to Major Harrington's CQ frequency on the helicopter's radio. Flipping dials feverishly, he had been unable to raise anyone. Prudhoe was shut down, but good.

  "Crap," he had groaned. "Tonight of all nights. They should be monitoring around the clock. How in hell can we warn them if nobody's on the goddamn horn?"

  Keio had smiled faintly. "Could be that the fix is already in," he had said. "Somebody deliberately arranged it so nobody can get through to Prudhoe."

  Faces had drawn to even sterner cast.

  Flying through the frigid night, the Phoenix team had devised swift patchup to its riddled war plan. Where to hit INLA first—at Prudhoe, or at the pipeline itself? In the end the decision had been arrived at with relative ease.

  Prudhoe, without a doubt, could be salvaged. Emergency crews would swarm over the base; the facility could be operational within forty-eight hours. But should the pipeline be blown in three places as the INLA rat had indicated, the damage would be irreversible. Total shutdown. In their isolated location, one hundred miles south of Prudhoe, in the dead of winter, it would take crews weeks to gear up for repairs.

  By then it would be altogether too late.

  On to Toolik.

  Now, abruptly, the Long Ranger angled downward. As it skimmed four feet off the ground the five commandos were dropping from both sides, rolling to stand-up position, fanning out, assault rifles spattering pin-down rounds across the landscape. Encizo, again in charge of the Stoner, and Manning, fisting the CAR-15, fanned out to execute the four remaining hardmen. Behind them the others poured a withering firescreen as they raced forward in low crouch.

  For his part, Grimaldi rocketed skyward as fast as he could fling levers, taking no chances of drawing a crippling round.

  Manning windmilled an M-26 against the night. Again the shearing, flat whump. Again the shrill scream sounded from behind the outcropping as the wounded terror goon headed off toward death.

  To the east, cowering behind rocks, stunted pine and tamarack, the three remaining terrorists opened up with their stolen M-16s, virtually begging for instant death. Phoenix Force chewed snow, crawling forward on their bellies, each man wild to be the first to send the rats into their final rag-doll jig. Keio, in a flamboyant gesture, came to full height and whizzed two more grenades up the incline.

  One bastard bailed out from behind his tree and began rolling down the hill, his bloody back making a dotted-line pattern in the snow. The others panicked, broke from cover and began crashing deeper into the woods.

  As if on a pull string, Phoenix rose en masse and opened up, cartridges flying like brass birds at the edges of their vision. The terrorists stopped suddenly, bouncing back, as if they had slammed into a wall. Arms flew up at cockeyed, fractured angles; M-16s were flung high over their heads. They performed brief death dances in the snow and went down for good, their clothes spouting blood in a dozen places at once.

  The five men of Phoenix took inventory. Six men at the first dropoff, the kid had said. They counted methodically.

  Six, exactly.

  As they slogged back down the hill, waving Grimaldi down, Keio shouted from the left flank. "Hey, take a look at this."

  "I'll be goddamned." Encizo sighed. "Is this an inside job, or is this an inside job? Talk about organized."

  The wide, deep gashes in the snow were unmistakable. Two tracked vehicles had been dropped in beforehand. Both were long gone—loaded with Grey Dogs—and speeding toward the next strike zones.

  "M113s," Yakov said, respect for their adversaries building within him, "or I miss my bet. That kid never mentioned this."

  "How in hell did they get them out here without anyone at Prudhoe getting suspicious?" McCarter asked.

  "It all falls into place, doesn't it?" Keio replied. "Complete infiltration of the chain of command. A man who knows the top man. The APCs came in on sky cranes. All properly manifested, of course."

  They stood in a disgruntled huddle, out of range of the Bell's rotorwash, while Manning scrambled up the VSMs, expertly dismantling the demolition setup.

  "Enough C-3 there to blow up two pipelines," he reported. "From all indications, they weren't going to detonate immediately. Which suggests a domino effect, from Prudhoe on down the line:"

  "Maybe we've still got a chance," Yakov muttered. "Although time's running out on us."

  "So?" Rafael said, his voice expectant, hoping against hope. "What now?"

  "Mount up," Katz snapped. "Head them off if we can."

  It was as they moved toward the chopper that Encizo suddenly stopped in his tracks, clapped his hand to his forehead. "I'll be damned," he exclaimed.

  "Rafael?" Katz said, concerned. "What is it?"

  "Just in case none of you noticed . . ." He grinned playfully. "We just missed New Year's Eve. Happy New Year, guys."

  Nobody answered at first. Faces bleak, the irony of the reminder registered strongly.

  "Yeah," Manning said finally, his voice flawed. "Happy New Year."

  Moments later the Phoenix express was again airborne, Grimaldi skimming the pipeline at one hundred twenty miles per hour, holding at a hundred-foot elevation. Heading due north. Six sets of eyes scoured the ground beneath, six mouths cursed the damnable visibility as random sheets of ground fog made things even more soupy.

  Then, suddenly, almost too late . . .

  Their stomachs were left at elevation one hundred, each man clawing at the cabin fixtures for balance as Grimaldi shot the Bell up with sickening swiftness. "They spotted us," he rasped. "That's fifty-caliber ammo coming up. Another two seconds and they'd have zapped us for sure."

  Reaching four thousand feet, safely out of range of the superpowered Browning M-2, Grimaldi level
ed off and commenced circling the area where the APC had hunkered down. From that height there was no way to tell what the INLA hardmen were up to. They could operate with total impunity with armor like the Browning at their backs.

  "What now, coach?" Rafael confronted Yakov, his teeth clenched in rage. "We've got nothing that can touch that."

  "Haven't we?" Manning challenged, emerging from the back of the cabin, a long, blanket-wrapped cylinder braced in his hands. "Remember this baby?"

  It was the Dragon M-47, the antitank weapon that, when selected earlier by Manning for inclusion in their arsenal, all had derided. "Set us down a mile ahead of that personnel carrier," he told Grimaldi. "We'll come in overland, catch them by surprise. Once I lock the sight on that baby buggy, there's no way in hell the missile can go astray. Goodbye armor plate."

  Spirits revived. And as Grimaldi swung wide and began dropping, they reloaded the rifles, restocked ammo on their cartridge belts. Encizo brought forward two of the six missiles stacked in the back, the armor-piercing shell in convenient carrying pack. "Those bastards'll never know what hit 'em," he chortled.

  Again Phoenix was on the snowfield, Grimaldi jetting up immediately, prowling nonstop to keep the enemy off balance. There was a mile and a half between them and the APC—a mile before they would actually set up for the missile strike—and they set out gamely, moving as fast as the paralyzing cold could allow.

  Finally, the M113 only a black blur in the gloom, the Irish terrorists otherwise invisible, Manning and Encizo began to set up. The missile in the chamber, the nose tripod set up, Manning seated in the snow, bracing his body with cocked knees, they ran a quick dry run. Then they waved Yakov, Keio and McCarter away. They would be flanking to the south, ready to do a pincer the minute the missile homed in on the APC. "Give us five," Yakov called, "to sneak up on them."