Enemies Within

by Don Pendleton

  The list went on and on.

  That quickly, Brognola made up his mind. He cleared his cell’s screen, dialed his office and raised his secretary Kelly on the line. He kept his orders terse and to the point. “I need a chopper ready yesterday, at Ronald Reagan National. Load TAC gear for one on the flight. You know the drill. I’ll give the destination on arrival.”

  A crisp “Yes, sir,” came back to him, no questions asked, before Brognola cut the link. That done, he leaned in toward his driver and repeated some of it. “Change course for Reagan National. Air Cargo Road. The usual.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  His driver didn’t have to ask about “the usual.” There was a massive air freight cargo building on Air Cargo Road—no great surprise, considering the highway’s name—and close to it, a hangar Justice used for certain helicopter flights, also stashing there a Learjet 70/75 light business jet aircraft for hops around the States when needed in a rush. The Lear would be no use to Brognola in Richmond, since he didn’t plan on diverting to the local airport. What he wanted now was access to the battle site, assuming that he didn’t make it there too late.

  In terms of TAC gear, that would be a Kevlar vest with pouches for spare magazines to fit the Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine gun that awaited him, more pouches for Glock 22 mags, a TMT A1 flashlight, a first-aid kit, survival knife and a canteen in case he planned to hang around and make a day of it.

  As if.

  Brognola hadn’t led a raid in years. He wouldn’t be leading this one, but the basics never left you once you’d learned them and then put those lessons to use in the field.

  Like falling off a log, right, but he didn’t plan on falling down unless one of the AWOL Rangers punched his ticket and the lights went out. In which case it would be game over, man.

  And nothing mattered after that.

  East Byrd Street, Richmond, Virginia

  Gunfire crackled along the thoroughfare as Bolan watched the Secret Service SUV swoop past him toward the armored trucks under attack. He heard a bullet whisper past his ear and ducked instinctively, fighting to keep his balance on the slope of wet grass, cold water from the sprinklers drizzling down his face.

  The lead truck obviously wasn’t going anywhere. Between the smoke emerging from beneath its hood and boiling up around its front end, he wondered if the GM Canon’s V6 engine might be cooked. More to the point, it seemed the transport’s driver wasn’t trying to advance, despite the pair of SUVs blocking his path.

  The answer to that riddle came to Bolan as he saw a black man pop up above the Canyon’s fender on its driver’s side, a ghostly figure in the roiling smoke. He didn’t need to guess who that was: Tyrone Moseley in the flesh, and close enough to have employed the driver’s gun port as a weapon on his own behalf.

  It would be carnage in the transport’s cab, no need to picture it as Bolan raised his Steyr AUG and tried to frame his target in the gun’s telescopic sight. The scope caught Moseley in its simple, black-ring reticle with basic rangefinder, but training or a Ranger’s gut instinct had to have alerted him before Bolan squeezed off a 5.56 mm NATO round and sent it hurtling on its way. Infuriatingly, the man dropped out of sight while Bolan’s FMJ boat tail round glanced off the transport’s smoking hood and flew off into space.

  Closer, he thought, and pushed on toward the action, watching for the other Rangers, whether three or four were still in play. He didn’t know how badly Colonel Knowlton had been hit by Jack Grimaldi’s .45 round back at Flame Tree Estates, but instinct told Bolan that if the former officer could pull his weight at all, he wouldn’t miss the grand payday that lay behind the fake jihadist scam.

  Whether he wound up facing four or five hostiles, with Jack Grimaldi in support, it took only two lucky shots to end the game.

  And with a squad of combat-seasoned Rangers, luck had damned little to do with it.

  * * *

  Sergeant Ramona Graff drew back from the view port between the GM Canyon’s cargo bay and driver’s cab, telling Agent Alton Schuyler, “They’re both dead up here.”

  “Jesus! Now what?”

  “Now nothing,” she answered back. “We sit and wait.”

  “For what?”

  “The cavalry, whatever. How in hell do I know, Schuyler?”

  There was no access between the transport’s sections, by design. Communications, yes, but they were useless with the driver and his passenger both shot to hell up front. That meant no movement of the blood-soaked bodies or a fresh attempt to get the GM Canyon running, plow ahead through any obstacles, and lead the other armored truck out of the trap that now surrounded them.

  That was the bad news. On the up side, if she saw it that way, Sergeant Graff carried a P-90 submachine gun, while Agent Schuyler had a Remington 870 12-gauge, both in addition to their SIG Sauer P-229 sidearms. They could fight to keep intruders from the shrink-wrapped bales of currency—or, on the flip side, they could die like Chris Isom behind the steering wheel, Jerome Dupree slumped down beside him in the cab, up front.

  Graff knew exactly what they had to do and did not hesitate. “We need to lock the gun ports down right now,” she said, “before the bastards hose us, too.”

  Schuyler set down his shotgun, scrambling to obey. The gun port mechanism was simplicity itself, a latch that held a little armored door in place until it was released and cleared for action in emergencies. He locked down the starboard side first, then crawled on hands and knees to latch the gun port set into the truck’s rear door. Before he’d finished, Graff had sealed and locked the gun port on the driver’s side, which should have meant they were secure.

  And yet...

  The raiding party had grenades and automatic weapons. What else were they bringing to the party that she didn’t know about? Plastic explosives, take your pick, would be enough to crack the cargo bay, stun anyone inside or kill them outright, and permit the would-be thieves to bag their haul. Granted, they might come under fire from agents in the second transport, or from Captain Elsberry and company responding in the SUV, but so far, in the short time since the ambush, the attack seemed to have gone like clockwork.

  Sergeant Graff had thought about her odds of dying on the job—taking a bullet for some fat-cat politician, maybe, when she’d rotated to a protection detail—but hadn’t planned ahead for anything like this. Penned up inside an armored coffin, going nowhere, gray smoke roiling around the cargo bay’s two armored windows, Graff imagined being rolled into a crematorium before a medic had pronounced her dead.

  As if in answer to her silent thought, Schuyler demanded, “What about the gas tank, Sarge?”

  “Well, what about it?” she replied, knowing where his mind had gone.

  “What if the attackers blow it up?”

  “It’s armored under there, just like the rest,” she said.

  “Yeah, right. But so’s the engine and now we’re stalled.”

  “It’s not the same.” She tried to reassure him.

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Listen up, Alton. You keep a sharp eye on that back door viewing port, all right?”

  “Okay.”

  “And if you see somebody creeping up behind us...”

  “Yeah?”

  “Open the gun port and give him a dose of double 0. Now hush and let me think, will you?”

  * * *

  Unlike Mack Bolan, Jack Grimaldi did slip on the soggy greenbelt grass. In fact, he landed on his keister, slid a bit and almost tumbled off the curb into the right-hand lane of East Byrd Street. He stopped the skid by digging in his heels and one elbow while being showered with cold, fresh water in the middle of a warm, dry afternoon.

  And he was hunched there, just about to rise and follow Bolan, when the Secret Service SUV swept past him, its shrill siren driving pins into his eardrums. Nothing subtle there.

  The Stony Man pilot co
uldn’t make out faces through the SUV’s dark windows, only four shapes, three of them with guns up, while the driver fought his steering wheel and overtook the convoy’s second armored truck in line. The first had wound up stalled somehow, embroiled in smoke, while Grimaldi had set down the Bell and bailed to follow Bolan on the run into a storm of hostile fire.

  Where were the AWOL Rangers? Two had driven up solo and swung their vehicles across two lanes to block the Secret Service caravan. The third potential hit car—spotted by the UAV on high with three figures inside it—was still behind the action, a block or so. Grimaldi had no doubt they’d be closing in before the second hand on his watch made another circuit of its busy dial.

  But one thing at a time.

  He scrambled to his feet, glanced at their chopper from force of habit, then focused entirely on the Secret Service caravan. Up front, Bolan was firing at the road-blocking SUVs, but both lone occupants were on the move, flanking the forward transport in its pall of drifting smoke.

  Grimaldi didn’t want to think about the transport’s driver, his up-front passenger, why neither of them made any move to batter past the blocking vehicles and drive away. That meant the pair was injured—stunned perhaps, or even dead—and starting the melee with two out of a dozen special agents down was bad. It also left the two guards in the GM Canyon’s rear compartment cut off from the world, unless they bailed into smoke and flying lead.

  Grimaldi’s first impulse was to relieve those two somehow, although he couldn’t frame a solid game plan in his head. Just moving forward would suffice for now, the next few seconds, if—

  A missing Ranger he only recognized from Bolan’s DVD files appeared: Lieutenant Tyrone Moseley. He was circling around the left rear of the lead transport, watching the second armored truck in line and peppering its windshield with short bursts of M-4 carbine autofire.

  Grimaldi saw his chance and took it, shouldering his Steyr AUG and lining up its telescopic sight instinctively, milking a 3-round-burst out of the rifle from a range of forty, maybe fifty, feet.

  The bullets found their mark, rippling the fabric of his target’s OD surplus jacket, driving Moseley backward. But there was no spray of blood from impact and as the Ranger vanished around the left rear corner of the lead transport, the Stony Man pilot knew he had to be wearing body armor, maybe Type III, conditioned to withstand 5.56 mm NATO rifle rounds.

  Damn it! Grimaldi thought. Head shots next time, or maybe try the legs and pelvis, break him down that way.

  Whatever worked, but he knew one thing, even if he hadn’t dropped his man. Three 5.56 mm hits would have an impact on the man behind the body armor and were bound to hurt like hell. Maybe they’d even cracked a rib or two, enough to slow him down next time he showed himself.

  The trick now was to overtake Moseley before he slipped away; line up another burst and finish it. It sounded simple in the pilot’s head, but nothing could be further from the truth. His man might well be staggered, even injured, but Moseley would also be on full alert now, conscious of an enemy approaching, stalking him.

  And with a battle-tested US Army Ranger, that could only be bad news.

  * * *

  “Goddamn that hurts!” Moseley said, only half conscious of the fact that he’d spoken aloud. His chest felt like a giant boxer’s punching bag, throbbing with pain. He couldn’t tell if anything was broken when he slipped a hand inside his OD jacket, felt the dimples in his armored vest, relieved at least that there was no blood on his fingers when he drew them back.

  Who was that guy?

  Not Secret Service; Moseley knew that from a glance. The transport agents would be wearing standard uniforms—white shirts for foot patrol around protected sites in Washington, black otherwise, easy to pick out in a crowd with badges, nameplates, Kevlar TAC vests on a run like this. The guy who’d shot Moseley looked more like a civilian or a merc who’d missed the memo on his dress code. And there had been something else.

  What was it, now?

  The chopper, right.

  It had dropped out of nowhere, landed on East Byrd Street’s grassy shoulder, while the prick with his assault rifle had come to join the fray.

  One man alone, riding the whirlybird? It made no sense to Moseley, and when something made no sense, he reckoned it wasn’t true.

  So there’d be others in the mix, as well, some kind of airborne reinforcements for the Secret Service team. Major Darby had talked about it as a possibility while they were laying out their plans, and now it had come true.

  From the glimpse he’d caught, the chopper was a Bell, the kind that could accommodate a one-or two-man crew, plus eight or nine warm bodies in the back. Moseley dismissed that possibility, knowing he would have seen more hostiles coming toward him, would have stopped more lead, if there were nine or ten additions to the Secret Service team on-site.

  But even two could swing the balance, sure, when Darby’s team was one man down, another wounded by whoever had shot him earlier outside Juanita Alvarado’s place. The only way to shave those odds, he realized, was to start taking out the Secret Service agents who remained, along with any tagalongs.

  And that meant starting now.

  The lieutenant pocketed the shaped C-4 charge he had planned to use to crack the lead transport’s back door. Its detonator wasn’t activated yet and wouldn’t be until he’d slapped the charge in place, prepared to crack the armored truck’s rear entrance, hosed the two agents in back with automatic fire, then grabbed as much cash as he could, filling a duffel that hung limp at the moment across his back.

  First thing he had to do, before he started grabbing bundles of long green, was go back and eliminate the bastard who had shot him, then find out how many others had descended with the chopper while his back had been turned. Once they were taken care of, that just left the Secret Service uniformed detail, down two agents already thanks to Moseley’s itchy trigger finger.

  And, of course, the local cops, who would be swarming to the ambush site by now, most unprepared for what they’d find, while headquarters scrambled to field SWAT teams from any precinct house available.

  In Richmond, Moseley knew from preparations in advance, there were four local PD stations, plus Virginia’s state police and the Henrico County Sheriff’s Office with its own force readily available. He wasn’t sure how many hundreds of cops that was, all told, but clearly more than five Rangers could handle on their best day, without one man being gut shot in advance.

  “So hurry up, already,” Moseley urged himself, speaking aloud once more. “Get on with it and split, before they serve your ass up on a plate.”

  Suiting words to action, the lieutenant moved.

  * * *

  “You see that chopper, Captain?” Secret Service Agent Carl Tilman asked from the SUV’s backseat.

  “Saw it and heard it,” Captain Elsberry replied. “That ought to be our backup, or at least some of it, anyway.”

  “Long as it’s not more hijackers,” Earley Olmstead said from the driver’s seat.

  “That would be all we need,” muttered Agent Lois Warner from her spot next to Tilman the rear.

  “Forget that,” Elsberry ordered, then said to Olmstead, “Pull up here, beside the second transport.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  Screeching tires.

  Elsberry was glad he’d kept his safety harness buckled, as the strap prevented him from walloping face-first into the dash. Cursing under his breath, he checked the safety on his P-90 submachine gun, switched it off, then reached down with his left hand to unbuckle his harness. At first the captain thought the catch had jammed, maybe the metal latching tab had bent somehow in their sudden stop, but then he found the tab, pressed it with his thumb, released himself and reached for the inside handle of his door.

  “Outside!” he barked. “All hands on deck!”

  Nobody bothered to acknowled
ge him, just scrambled to unload as fast as they could manage. Three of the chase car’s doors stood open as they bailed, but Lois Warner slammed hers shut, as if concerned about the dome lights and saving the battery.

  Elsberry landed in a crouch between the SUV and curb, using their vehicle for cover. When he risked a glance over its fender, his first sight was of a rifleman, Hispanic in appearance, nosing through a smokescreen, edging toward the lead truck’s side door on the right. He held an M-4 carbine in his right hand; in the left, a lump of something that resembled clay.

  Plastique.

  Elsberry saw his chance and raised his P-90, snuggling the bullpup stock into his shoulder socket, lining up the weapon’s tritium-illuminated reflex sight at 60 feet or less from his intended mark. The sight employed a red-dot optical collimator that zeroed in on the moving figure’s chest, although the target couldn’t see it, as with normal laser sights.

  The captain stroked the submachine gun’s trigger, sending a burst of six or seven slugs downrange. The barrage hit home solidly, sent the rifleman reeling and forcing him to drop his shaped charge.

  He didn’t drop the M-4 carbine, though, cursing in what Elsberry took for Spanish as he swung the rifle up and sprayed the Secret Service SUV with automatic fire. Slugs marched across its hood, chipping black paint, as Captain Elsberry dropped back and out of sight.

  And none too soon.

  The last couple of 5.56 mm slugs were earmarked for his face, but they sliced empty air instead and screamed off toward the houses situated south of East Byrd Street. Hoping no one was home for lunch this day, Elsberry wriggled forward on his stomach, letting the slug-scarred SUV conceal him for the moment as he tried to glimpse his adversary’s feet and legs.

  Too late.

  The guy was gone, damn it.

  Elsberry cursed his lost opportunity and wrote it off to hidden Kevlar, while he craned his neck to seek another target. Rangers came prepared, of course, which should have been no great surprise.

  Now all the captain had to do was find another mark and place his bullets where they’d count.