Exit Strategy. Don Pendleton

SEVEN

      Carl Lyons heard the thunder of Rosario Blancanales’s grenade launcher and got to work. He ambled up to the rear of the van, the bill of his battered ball cap shading his features to make him look less intimidating. His loose hiking gear also kept his broad shoulders and biceps on full display. The shotgun between his shoulder blades and obscured by his hiking pack was ready to draw and blaze away. He got to the sidewalk-side panel door and turned, giving it a vigorous kick.

      The man in the front passenger seat, ironically called the shotgun seat, threw open his door and stepped out, a pistol in hand.

      “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” the man shouted even as Lyons whipped out his brutal Mossberg semiauto. The shoulder stock extended and as soon as the gun was at eye level, the Able Team commander pulled the trigger. A fist-size knot of 00 Buck struck the gunman in the face, obliterating his features in an instant. The gunner’s corpse crashed against the passenger-side door, and it held him up for a few brief moments.

      Lyons charged to get into the seat that his first target had vacated. He seized the door frame with his left hand and pushed the shotgun into the front seat ahead of him. As soon as the muzzle touched the chest of the ambushers’ driver, who was busy starting the vehicle, he pulled the trigger. At contact range, Lyons unleashed a firestorm inside the driver’s torso. Ribs disintegrated into splinters, and the burning jet of force that hurled projectiles faster than the speed of sound added to the unfettered devastation that nine copper-jacketed balls a third of an inch across could tear through flesh.

      Rather than attempt to maneuver the barrel of the shotgun over the front seats, Lyons backed out immediately. With two strides, he was in the middle of the sidewalk and aiming at the area he’d just vacated. He saw an arm swing into view and blew it off with a well-aimed blast. He didn’t completely sever the limb, but the bones of the forearm were stripped of large chunks of muscle and artery. Blood squirted from the mangled limb.

      With a slight pivot, Lyons hammered out three more shotgun blasts at close range. The van’s sheet metal proved little hindrance to the concentrated salvos of pellets, and the gunmen inside the vehicle released grunts of pain and dying breath as they caught the deformed slugs in vital areas. The panel door unlatched and swung open, but Lyons caught the first one there with a volcanic boom.

      In the second time in seemingly as many seconds, the thug’s skull was excavated, face and brains stripped out of the crushed bowl that used to be his head. A figure was just over the nearly decapitated man’s shoulder and Lyons pivoted and pulled the trigger. The Able Team commander killed that gunman with a flourish of gore, the shotgun spraying the interior of the van with spongy clots of shredded human and splintered skeleton. This was full-on slaughter, the eye for an eye writ large, as Lyons considered a fellow lawman worth a dozen dead gun thugs.