Schwarz was brilliant yet paranoid. He’d set up the small multipurpose communicators to melt down if someone tried to access the electronics within. Since there was no burned puddle of smoldering desk, things were all right.
Lyons had no qualms about entering a den of heavily armed smugglers, but even he didn’t intend to anger Schwarz by leaving one of his prized creations behind in enemy hands.
He noticed that he’d gotten a message while he’d been dealing with Scalia.
Strike in Indiana. We’re wheels up in thirty without you, the text read.
Lyons opened a link to his partners as he dumped his empty shotgun, exiting the smugglers’ office. “Able One reporting in.”
“There you are,” Schwarz said. “I didn’t see one bit of the Chicago skyline disappear, so I thought you were taking a nap.”
Lyons knew that his friend’s levity was concealing concern for his safety. “Tell Mott to hold up until I get there. I’ve got trouble brewing in Idaho now.”
“At least four of the bombs landed in a little armpit of a town called Albion,” Schwarz told him. “We’re heading there to see what’s up.”
“Never heard of the place,” Lyons answered, sliding behind the wheel of his rental car.
“Never will again,” Schwarz returned. “Everyone in town was killed, including several sheriff’s deputies.”
Lyons glared at the offices. Now that he was back in his car, he had access to an M-4 with an underbarrel grenade launcher. If anyone dared to poke his face out the front door, he’d lay into the mobsters with high-explosive death.
Sadly, the smugglers were too smart to tempt fate. They’d hunkered down, knowing that to pursue Lyons would be suicide.
“Play now, pay later,” Lyons snarled as a grim promise, driving off to the airport to meet with the rest of his team.
CHAPTER FOUR
In his younger days, David McCarter, the current leader of Phoenix Force, had earned the reputation of a hard-driving badass. He always seemed to be in a constant state of pent-up, impulsive action, easily growing bored, even with training exercises. He’d lived on the edge, primed and ready for battle. Back then, waiting for the start of conflict was something that ate at the young warrior’s nerves.
These days, though, as commander of Phoenix Force, McCarter learned what had been missing. He’d lived his entire life seeking challenges that could match his phenomenal skills, taking to the cockpit of any new aircraft he could to master its maneuvers, testing out various martial arts to find their strengths in relation to others. He devoured books continually, starting out in military history but spreading out to political philosophy and analysis of current events. Far from a thug, he realized that the untamed fires within his gut were a strength that sought a task worthy of him.
Being the brains of Phoenix Force was that task, and the times when his impatience would get the better of him had disappeared as he applied his experience to plotting actions and reactions even before the first shot was fired.
So when the Syrians attacked, just as McCarter had anticipated, he was not only ready, but had also prepared Phoenix Force to deal with the sudden arrival. Experience had taught the Briton that there was little that could be done when a member of a country’s covert-operations community came to harm or capture. He remembered avenging the deaths of colleagues, and he recalled when a Phoenix ally, Karl Hahn, was kidnapped by a terrorist group and the team went rogue to bring him home alive. The Syrians had lost men to Bezoar, and even if Damascus had sent orders for the hit team’s comrades to pull back, anger and loss of friends were powerful spurs.
There was no way they were going to let this insult to their fellowship pass.
McCarter also knew that sometimes anger made men sloppy. From their approach to the front doors, ignoring even the obviously armed Hawkins strolling down the street, McCarter knew that they were focused on the job of bringing hell to Bezoar and his crew of fellow murderers. He keyed his hands-free radio to toss out the orders.
“Go time. T.J., even the odds should Bezoar’s people or the Syrians seem to be winning. Keep out of the way, though. You’re not packed for a proper dustup,” McCarter ordered. “Gary…”
“Eyes in the sky, backing T.J. and monitoring you,” Manning answered.
“Rafe, Cal, it’s on,” McCarter said. “T.J., remember, nothing gets past you to the public.”
“On it,” Hawkins answered.
Amid the chatter of automatic weapons, the men of Phoenix Force took flight.
THE SYRIANS HAD blown in, loaded for bear, especially if that bear wore tank armor and carried a grenade launcher, Hawkins mused as he found cover in a doorway, drawing the sleek Belgian P-90 machine pistol from under his jacket. Three SUVs screeched to a halt, windows open and assault rifles hammering at the windows of Bezoar’s Parisian safehouse. The twisting, narrow street in front of the house was clogged by the big vehicles’ presence. They opened fire on the windows of the storefront that Bezoar had set up as a diner so ram-shackle that even the prostitutes didn’t want a piece of it. The roar of big engines in the predawn had sent the women scrambling, their street instincts telling them that the trucks had either belonged to police or an organized hit crew.
Either way, they wanted nothing to do with that fight, disappearing between buildings or scurrying down the street past Hawkins. They studiously ignored him as the glass of the storefront diner disappeared in a solid wave of lead. Anyone who had been inside would have been shredded, and from what Hawkins had seen, there were a couple of men nursing cold coffee mugs as they cast anxious glares into the darkened street.
The Syrians weren’t holding back. The unmistakable thump of a 40 mm grenade launcher echoed down toward Hawkins’s doorway, its high-explosive message shaking the ground at his feet.
“Dave, the Syrians are going nuclear,” Hawkins said into his throat mike.
“Heard that,” McCarter replied. “Bide your time.”
Hawkins grimaced, hating the wait, but the Briton had given his orders, and he had pulled the team through countless confrontations.
The Syrians piled out of their vehicles, a dozen strong, as their trucks idled, drivers and shotgun riders waiting behind them to secure their getaway transportation. A quick glance told Hawkins that he was smart to have brought along a 50-round magazine full of armor-piercing ammunition. The SUVs were solidly built, and the way the lights of the skinny road reflected off their windshields let him know that they were armored. He reminded himself that Phoenix had wrung the compact machine pistols out, and their 5.8 mm rounds could punch through a titanium plate backed by twenty layers of Kevlar out to two hundred meters and go through 9 mm of steel plate at fifty. He was barely fifteen meters from the lead SUV, meaning that no matter how resistant the glass, he’d be able to put rounds into the interior without much effort.
One of the men in the lead truck poked his head and weapon out of the window. This guy had a submachine gun, as well, and he’d noticed Hawkins’s quick peek at the clogged road. Hawkins couldn’t make out what the gunner was packing, but it sure as hell wasn’t a folded newspaper and a cup of coffee. The roar of autofire filled the air as the doorjamb suddenly came alive with bullet impacts. Hawkins held his ground, enduring splinters of brick and old paint peppering his exposed face.
Whatever they were carrying, it was only a 9 mm, and for that he was grateful. Still, just because it couldn’t penetrate into his cubbyhole didn’t mean that Hawkins was free and clear to ignore the incoming fire. Once the barrage let up, Hawkins ducked low, rolled into the middle of the narrow road and opened up on a spot just above the SUV’s headlights.