“Up a little higher,” Schwarz told Grimaldi. “Then ease in a little closer.”
Grimaldi urged the OH-58C up and forward, trying to bring the shooter back into view. As he did so, rounds from yet another gunman began to pepper the chopper’s underside. Grimaldi turned to his right and saw the enemy leaning out from a large, wisteria-choked pergola behind the bungalow.
“Three o’clock!” he shouted.
“Got him!”
Schwarz shifted position and leveled his M-16, firing before the assailant could retreat behind one of the pergola’s wooden colonnades. The rounds found flesh and the gunner keeled to the ground, his upper torso freshly embroidered.
The first shooter, emboldened by Schwarz’s distraction, rose from behind the flagstone wall and sent a fusillade whizzing through the chopper doorway before Gadgets whirled back around and nailed him.
By now Lyons and Blancanales had reached the bungalow. Grimaldi left them to raid the interior and pulled away, guiding the chopper above a meandering walkway that led back to the remaining building, a larger, one-story cinder-block orientation center with a sun-faded sign out front that still beckoned visitors with an inviting come-on: Our Spring’s Just the Thing!
The first of the SWAT ground units had begun to materialize from out of the vegetation surrounding the orientation center. Wearing flak jackets over their camo fatigues, they spread out, encircling the building. From Grimaldi’s aerial perspective, he could see that the main entrance was still boarded up, but a side door was ajar. As he watched, two of the SWAT officers approached the entryway, one brandishing a MAC-10, the other a semiautomatic Benelli M-1 shotgun. They were within ten yards of the door when it suddenly flew open. A short, wiry man dived out headfirst, rolling on impact with the ground and scrambling quickly to his feet, a 9 mm Heckler & Koch MP-5 cradled close to his chest. He managed to fire a killshot into the face of the SWAT shotgunner before being brought down by the other commando’s MAC-10.
As the rest of the SWAT team converged on every available opening to the O-building, Grimaldi brought the chopper up higher in the hope of gaining a vantage point from which Schwarz could effectively lend fire from the air. The maneuver was a fortuitous one.
Seconds later, with a deafening roar, a series of explosive charges detonated inside the building, blowing its cinder-block walls outward and turning the roof into a frag shower that hailed upwards, pelting the OC-58’s skids and underbelly. Had Grimaldi not just changed his position, the flying shrapnel would have likely sheared his rotors, bringing the bird down. As it was, the flyboy was hard-pressed to keep the chopper aloft when the blast’s shock wave tossed the craft about.
The jolt caught Schwarz off guard and threw him out the Bell’s open doorway, M-16 flying from his grasp. If not for his martial arts training, the Stony Man warrior would likely have plummeted sixty feet to certain death on the flagstone walkway below. Instead, with nimble instincts, Schwarz was able to throw out his right arm and break his fall by grabbing the chopper’s right skid. His fingers clamped tightly around the cold metal, buying him the time needed to raise his other arm and secure a firmer grip.
“Still here!” he shouted through clenched teeth.
Grimaldi couldn’t hear Schwarz over the rotors and the din of the explosion, but when the displaced weight pitched the chopper to one side he realized Schwarz was still aboard and quickly compensated, righting the aircraft and then slowly bringing it down.
Lyons and Blancanales had been knocked to the ground by the blast, but by the time the OH-58C had dipped to within ten yards of the pathway, both men were on their feet. They scrambled over and grabbed Schwarz’s dangling legs, allowing him to let go of the chopper’s skid. As they eased him down to solid ground, the helicopter floated off, bound for the parking lot where the whole ordeal had begun.
“Nice stunt,” Lyons told Schwarz. “You had us going there for a minute.”
“Tell me about it,” Schwarz said, flexing the life back into his numbed fingers. “Don’t try this at home, kids.”
The team’s levity was short-lived, giving way to a grim silence as they made their way to the debris-filled crater that had once been the orientation center. The blackened, smoldering hellhole was nearly twenty feet deep, flames consuming any trace of the explosives that had created it. Lying on the perimeter like tossed dolls were the members of the SWAT team, most of them dismembered by shrapnel, none of them breathing.
“What the hell did they have stored in there, World War III?” Lyons wondered, gazing past the bodies into the crater.
The blast had caught the attention of the rest of the backup teams, and by the time Grimaldi joined his colleagues, the other two choppers were headed toward them. Sirens wailed to life out on the road as a pair of CHP Crown Victorias pulled out of their barricade positions and raced toward the parking lot along with one of the SWAT Hummers.
“They’re a little late,” Schwarz said.
Blancanales had ventured over to the enemy gunman who’d dived from the building shortly before the explosion. He turned the body over, then looked at his partners.
“It’s not Ahmet,” he reported.
Lyons glanced at the crater and shook his head. “If he’s in there, it’s gonna take more than dental charts to ID him.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Stony Man Farm, Virginia
“They had a couple choppers on their tail in the homestretch but made it to Israel in one piece,” Barbara Price said, clipboard in hand as she paced the Annex Computer Room, apprising the Stony Man cybercrew on Phoenix Force’s mad dash for a safe haven after taking out the Hezbollah training camp in the Bekaa Valley. She’d just gotten off the phone with David McCarter, who’d called from a covert Mossad medical facility near Nahariya. “We lost a Company op and Calvin needs to be threaded up where some briars tore his leg open, but everyone else pulled through with nicks and scratches.”
“Is Manning coming down from Damascus to hook up with them?” Huntington Wethers inquired.
“No,” Price responded. “He’s rebounded from the concussion but it looks like he has a separated shoulder, so he’ll be out of the combat loop awhile.”
“Looks like?” Delahunt interjected.
“There was a problem with the X-ray machine where he was treated,” Price said. “They went with a best-guess diagnosis and have him in an arm sling. He insisted on pitching in somehow, so we’ve got him flying to Hong Kong to see if he can find out what Kassem’s up to.”
“Are our guys dedicated or what?” Kurtzman marveled.
“Back to the camp raid,” John Kissinger said. “How’d the Snake fare?”
Kissinger, the Farm’s tall, broad-shouldered weaponsmith, had pulled up a chair next to Aaron Kurtzman’s computer station and helped himself to some of Bear’s infamous coffee. The ex-DEA field agent usually didn’t bother with mission briefings but he’d made an exception for this one, anxious to hear how his TCD-100 had performed in its first true test.
“T.J. says you’d better hurry to the patent office,” Price told him. “He says the Snake aced everything it’s programmed for.”
“Uh-oh,” Akira Tokaido sniggered from across the room. “Watch, Cowboy’ll land himself one of those monster defense contracts and that’ll be the last we see of him.”
“You wish,” Kissinger laughed. “It’ll take more than a windfall for you guys to get rid of me.”
“With James and Manning out, we could always ship you out to help Phoenix Force pick up the slack,” Kurtzman suggested.
“No problem there,” Kissinger said.
“We might actually take you up on that,” Price stated.