Enemies Within

by Don Pendleton

  Armored it was, but not enough to stop that blast. Not even close.

  It would mean death for anyone inside the transport’s rear compartment, shrapnel doubtless damaging some of the cash inside, as well, but there would be more than enough to salvage for a future on a beach somewhere, untroubled by arrest warrants and extradition fears.

  All it required, after the blast, was moving money from the transport to the Escalade while under fire from any agents in the convoy who’d survived, loading the money again and getting out of there before the roof fell in on top of them.

  Simple for a magician, maybe, but for soldiers on the firing line...

  Get on with it, he urged the major silently.

  Another precious second ticked away and then the Barkas spoke, a tongue of smoke and flame erupting from its back end, taking nearly all the launcher’s recoil with it as the rocket flew. At that range, Darby barely had to aim, but Knowlton knew he would have used the weapon’s collimating sight regardless, lining up the shot for safety’s sake. It wouldn’t do for him to flinch and overshoot the target, sending off their rocket for a mighty splash somewhere downrange, perhaps blasting an office block or a stack of high-rent condominiums.

  Knowlton was crouching when the rocket found its mark, his teeth clenched as another spike of protest radiated from his wound. Then he was up and moving through the pungent smoke, holding his M-4 carbine ready to eliminate whoever might have managed to survive the blast by pure dumb luck. It was unlikely, but—

  Who in hell was firing from the GM Canyon’s gaping maw? Not one, but two weapons responding while the rocket’s detonation echoed up and down East Byrd Street. Someone in there had a fully automatic weapon, lighter caliber than he was used to from his training and deployments to The Sandbox. The other was a plain, old 12-gauge shotgun, nonetheless deadly for that, since each shot put a spray of double 0 buckshot in flight, each leaden pellet the equivalent in size of a .33-caliber bullet.

  Knowlton hit the blacktop with a grunt of pain he couldn’t silence, lining up his carbine’s optic sight on the transport’s crumpled back hatch. He had his index finger on the trigger, hesitating only when he thought about a burst of 5.56 mm rounds shredding more currency than the explosive charge already had.

  Each bill he shot to hell was one more he’d never get to spend on wine, women and song when he reached his final destination and was living out his days, safe from the law. But if he held his fire, conversely, they would never get their hands on any of the cash, which meant the whole charade had been in vain.

  “Screw it,” he said, firing a 3-round burst into the truck.

  * * *

  Jack Grimaldi recognized the rocket launcher’s whoosh and dropped immediately to a prone position, head down, covered by one arm, letting his free hand clutch the Steyr’s pistol grip with its enclosed trigger. The explosion, when it came, was to his left and several yards behind him, most of it being absorbed by impact on the Secret Service convoy’s second GM Canyon. But he felt enough of it to grunt involuntarily and hunker down even farther, one cheek against the cool, wet grass.

  Someone had cracked the second box, a task that still eluded those up front, trying to breach the first transport in line. Disabling that truck was one thing, killing off its two guards in the cab another, but the cash in back was still beyond the AWOL Rangers’ reach.

  So far, at least, but if somebody didn’t intervene to stop them from cleaning out the other truck, the first one might become superfluous.

  Once he decided flying shrapnel from the rocket blast had passed him by, Grimaldi rolled and turned to face the second truck. Inside its cab, through tinted glass, he saw the driver and his passenger peering through some kind of a small, bulletproof window to the rear compartment of their transport, checking out the damage done. Whatever met their eyes—friends dead or wounded, money blown to smithereens or squatting on its pallets in the smoky armored cave, still salvageable for the thieves—Grimaldi couldn’t pick up on it telepathically.

  The only thing he could do now was to make his move and try to intervene before the looting started and they had another car chase on their hands. He glimpsed the Caddy Escalade some forty, fifty yards behind the second GM Canyon, safe for letting off an RPG without its blowback mangling any members of the ambush team, and had a sudden thought. He could disable it from where he lay, slam bullets through its grille, into the engine block, take out the two front tires, at least, and thus prevent a getaway as planned.

  Or he could face the Rangers, try to take them down instead, knowing that if they lost their ride, they’d only carjack someone else and steal their vehicle. The rubberneckers were already slowing down, some stopping altogether, for the chance to watch a real-life tragedy unfold. This wasn’t Richmond’s five o’clock news, discreetly sanitized for viewing by a family at home and sitting down for supper. Here, on East Bird Street, the gawkers could enjoy it all firsthand: the blood, the smoke and flames, the gunfire, even at a risk to their own lives.

  Welcome to Voyeur Nation, Grimaldi thought to himself, and scowled.

  He levered himself to all fours, then rose into a crouch, aware of gunfire all around him and the knowledge that it only took a single round from anywhere to drop him where he stood. That was the gamble, and he’d taken it before, more times than he could count since joining Bolan’s war.

  Once more. What could it hurt?

  Only his life at stake, so never mind. No sweat.

  He checked the Steyr AUG’s translucent, double-column magazine and saw it still contained most of the rifle’s thirty rounds. Enough to get him started, anyway, and if he ran short in the crunch, there was his Glock on tap to back it up with fourteen .45 ACP rounds. Knowing there would be four Rangers at most to deal with in or near the Escalade, it hardly felt like anything at all.

  Only a sixty-forty chance, or thereabouts, that Grimaldi would not be going home again.

  Old words came back to him now, Sergeant Major Daniel Daly of the 2nd Marine Regiment at Belleau Wood, in World War I, shouting at the men who hesitated to advance, “Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?”

  Grimaldi didn’t plan to live forever, but he still had work to do.

  And if he fell, he damned sure wasn’t going down alone.

  With grim, determined strides, the Stony Man pilot went to find the enemy.

  * * *

  Mack Bolan’s world had come down to explosions and the pop, pop, pop of gunfire. Nothing new in that—call it the usual—but when he heard the RPG blast from behind him, shockwave reaching out to make the lofting sprinkler water shiver from its passage, he knew the game was heating up.

  He glanced around for Grimaldi but couldn’t find the flyboy anywhere amid the swirling battle smoke. So be it. Each man for himself right now, and there were enemies enough to go around, even with one Ranger obliterated by his own mishandled C-4 charge.

  For starters, there was still the hostile who had tried to take him out with a grenade mere seconds earlier. Bolan had detected his advancing footsteps when the rocket blast went off and time had warped, stalling his adversary long enough to let the warrior brace himself to meet a charge.

  It didn’t quite play out that way, however, as another flying canister came into view, bounced once on sodden grass and then began expelling clouds of whitish smoke. No antipersonnel device this time; the Ranger seemingly desired to do the wet work of elimination personally, man to man.

  In which case, Bolan would be happy to oblige.

  He snugged the Steyr AUG’s polymer stock against his shoulder, peering through its integrated sight into the boiling fumes emitted by the latest smoke grenade. At first, he saw nothing, the Ranger hanging back, gauging his time and distance for a charge perhaps, and then a shadowy figure loomed out of the murk, looking deformed because his enemy was shuffling at a crouch, trying to minimize his personal e
xposure as a target.

  Bolan triggered a 3-round burst, angling below whatever kind of body armor the hijackers had put on before springing their trap. He heard a curse as the figure lurched backward, half turned, then went down.

  It was a fall, but not an instant kill, no matter what damage his 5.56 mm rounds had wrought on flesh and bone. The Ranger started firing as he fell, reflexively, and even though most of his slugs went high and wide, he might get lucky and take Bolan down.

  Another shout, this one twisted by agony, just before the M-4 bursts cut off while Bolan lost sight of his man again. He’d dropped somewhere beyond the right-front fender of the leading armored truck, and there could only be one way to root him out.

  Get up and do it, right.

  Bolan edged forward, shoulders hunched as automatic fire and shotgun blasts echoed around him, mixed with sounds of traffic rushing past or squealing to a halt on East Byrd Street. Sirens were audible, but still too far away to make a difference, and when the bluesuits landed, he would be merely another target in their sights, unless some message out of Washington had been dispatched to smooth the way.

  Call that no better than a fifty-fifty possibility, given the federal concern for secrecy surrounding anything that smacked of homegrown terrorism in this day and age.

  Rogue US Army Rangers? Everybody from the White House to the Pentagon and Justice would be lining up to keep a lid on that one, pulling any strings within their power to suppress the news.

  Which meant that Bolan, once again, was on his own except for Jack Grimaldi—if his friend and pilot hadn’t bought the farm by now.

  Bolan was two feet from the leading GM Canyon’s nose, eyes tearing from the smoke that rose around him, finger on the Steyr AUG’s trigger, the rifle now set for full-auto fire. He couldn’t tell whether his wounded enemy was out of it, unconscious, maybe even dead by now, or if he was alert enough to have his M-4 braced and aimed to meet whatever danger showed itself.

  Always expect the worst, and try to take it in your stride.

  Instead of simply rolling out around the transport’s fender, Bolan launched himself into a headlong dive, one of his elbows scraping on the concrete curb, spotting the figure of his enemy mere feet away from him.

  He fired without a conscious thought, without aiming, and heard the wet smacks of his FMJ rounds ripping into human flesh. The dying one-time Ranger toppled over backward, triggering his last M-4 burst toward the sky, most of his visage rendered by incoming slugs. Whatever thoughts he might have harbored in his final seconds took flight with the tattered remnants of his brain, spattered across asphalt.

  Lieutenant Tyrone Moseley was down and out. He made three, half of the AWOL Ranger squad. And that left two, maybe three, unless Grimaldi had finished off the wounded Andrew Knowlton.

  Bolan took nothing for granted as he rose and turned back toward the remnant of his urban battleground.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Hal Brognola’s Airbus H120 touched down eighty yards or so behind the action on East Byrd Street, rotors twirling while the Justice pilot looked across at him with raised eyebrows. The big Fed minced no words when it came to giving orders on the spot.

  “Get out of here,” he told the G-man from the Bureau’s Tactical Helicopter Unit. “Find someplace safe to park and wait it out. With any luck, I’ll call you pretty soon.”

  “Yes, sir,” the pilot said. “But—”

  “But nothing. Go before they spot you and start shooting.”

  And with that, Brognola hit the ground running, relieved of his harness, shoulders hunched forward to prevent the whirlybird’s three rotors from decapitating him.

  After the flight from Washington, with vibrations from the chopper’s turboshaft engine pulsing through his legs and lower torso, it felt strange to stand on solid ground again, much less to run. Toss in the fact that he was running toward a full-blown firefight in the middle of Virginia’s capital, and it was verging on surreal.

  Now all he had to do was carry out his self-appointed job and get back out again, alive and in one piece.

  He guessed somebody must be going nuts at Justice about then, beginning with his secretary, Kelly, whom he’d given a heads-up while on the fly, with ripples spreading out from there to make his boss have what Brognola’s mother used to call conniption fits. They would be reaching out to him by phone—which he’d turned off—to ask if he was stupid or insane going into the field, a fitting candidate for the department’s rubber gun squad if they ever got him back to Washington again.

  Good luck with that, Brognola thought. I’m taking first things first.

  And number one was doing what he could to help Mack Bolan and Jack Grimaldi make a clean sweep of the AWOL Rangers on the scene.

  Was flying down to Richmond nothing but an act of hubris on his part? Was he, in fact, deranged and ready for the scrap heap where demented agents went to slowly fade away?

  Not this guy, the big Fed decided. Within seconds he’d be in the thick of it, doing what he’d been trained to do since he was first assigned to chasing bad guys, all those years ago.

  As if to welcome him, a rocket launcher fired downrange, slamming its projectile into the back door of the second Secret Service truck in line. Smoke billowed from the gaping wound in armored steel, then small-arms fire intensified once more. Incredibly, someone was still alive inside that iron coffin and fighting back for all that they were worth.

  Brognola picked up speed, his index finger tucked inside his submachine gun’s trigger guard. He had a couple of his adversaries spotted, still no sign of Bolan or Grimaldi in the battle smoke, but he would face the enemy confronting him and take them down—or die in the attempt.

  * * *

  The high-explosive rocket blast should have killed Secret Service agents Chuck Oberon and Benjamin Meyer. Should have but hadn’t, since Oberon had seen their adversary with the shoulder-mounted launcher as he’d sighted on their vehicle and barked at Meyer, “Get down behind the currency! They’re lining up an RPG, and it’s the only cover in the house!”

  He didn’t have to tell Meyer twice. Huddled between the looming bales of shrink-wrapped currency and the armored divider separating them from access to the GM Canyon’s cab, they posed in fetal curls, hands clapped over their ears to minimize the shockwave damage, feet braced against cold, unyielding steel.

  Still, it was close.

  The transport rocked on its six tires, while smoke filled the rear compartment, causing both agents to hack and cough as they unwound themselves after the blast. Above them, gushing flames had blackened paintwork on the rear compartment’s walls and crisped some of the cash their enemies had come to steal, but that was someone else’s problem, to be sorted at another time.

  Blinking against the smoke, Oberon was first to rise, still crouching low behind the bales of money that would help absorb incoming small-arms fire. He had already cleared the safety on his P-90, setting the piece for 3-round bursts in a bid to conserve ammunition and enhance his accuracy. Close beside him, he heard Meyer jack a buckshot round into his Remington 870 and mutter something about kicking ass he likely hadn’t meant to say aloud.

  Whatever. They were in the soup now—something they had trained for countless times without believing it would ever happen on the street—and both agents knew what to do. Protect the currency no matter what, the same as they would safeguard any diplomat or politician placed into their care. No Secret Service agent ever clocked on thinking he or she would die during a given shift, but it was always on the table, always possible.

  As smoke cleared from the transport’s rear compartment, Oberon saw two figures closing in on foot. One of them was the rocket man, his launcher now discarded while he raised some kind of automatic rifle, probably an M-16, M-4 or one of their innumerable variants available to soldiers, lawmen and civilians everywhere from coast to coast.

 
“Steady,” he cautioned Meyer. “Bear in mind how many rounds you’ve got and make them count.”

  “I hear you,” Meyer replied.

  But it was their opponents, standing well back from the armored truck, who started firing first. The guy who’d dropped the rocket in their laps squeezed off a short burst, followed by another, then ducked down and off to one side as Oberon returned fire. The P-90 ejected spent cartridge casings downward through a chute behind the grip, keeping hot brass out of the shooter’s face and line of sight—a slick design Oberon appreciated now that he was fighting for his life from a confined space with restricted visibility.

  Beside him, Meyer fired a round of double 0 and pumped his shotgun’s slide, cursing as pellets blew a clean hole through the HE rocket smoke and showed him both live targets still in motion, ducking down and out of sight.

  “Goddamn! I had that guy!” he fumed.

  “Guess not,” Oberon said, tacking on, “I missed mine, too.”

  “They still have to get past us, though,” Meyer said.

  “Maybe. Unless—”

  Before Oberon could finish, an arm snaked out and pitched an ovoid object backhand, up and spinning as it flew into their smoky cave. The frag grenade landed on stacks of currency, bounced once and then fell into Oberon’s lap, making him gag in panic as he dropped his submachine gun, groping for the lethal egg with both free hands.

  How many seconds before the fuse burned down?

  “Grenade!” he shouted. “Down!”

  Pitching it back and out again was pure instinct, nothing Oberon had planned or ever would have in his life. The little antipersonnel bomb wafted back toward daylight then exploded in midair, while Oberon and his partner ducked behind their wall of currency again and waited for the shrapnel storm to pass.