The two choppers swung up the mountainside in echelon bare meters above the treetops of the near-vertical forest.
Grimaldi’s voice came over the link. “These boys aren’t bad.”
“Screw ’em,” Hawkins snapped.
“Rear target!” McCarter bellowed over the overwhelming rotor noise overhead. “Fire!”
Six stone-cold soldiers opened up. The two choppers were little more than thundering shadows save that they were commercial copters and their running lights flying straight up the mountain and barely overhead made for perfect target frames.
The chopper flying wing position took three hundred and fifty 9 mm rounds up his ass in the space of three seconds. The helicopter slewed and made a stuttering whirp-whirp-whirp noise as broken engine parts and severed hydraulic lines failed. The lead chopper summitted and disappeared into Sweden.
“Up yours, dude,” Hawkins swore. He and the rest of the team slammed in fresh 50-round magazines.
The stricken copter nosed up to apex in the starlight. It suddenly auto-rotated and nosed downward. Sparks and smoke belched out of it and the helicopter began wildly swinging down the mountainside, still barely above the tree line and suicidally straight at the safe house.
Hawkins reassessed. “Aw, damn…”
Behind them Phoenix Force heard glass and wood breaking as the enemy team hit the house.
Fire exploded out of the kamikaze helicopter as it came on like doomsday.
McCarter roared. “Forward! Forward! Forward! Hug trees!”
Phoenix Force ran forward. Olympic synchronized swimmers would have admired how they vaulted the hot tub and the tiny, motorized-current lap pool. As a unit they each found a beautiful pine tree, ran just past it and then fell against it.
The burning helicopter plowed into the back of the safe house. Rotors snapped, fuel tanks ruptured, the house’s natural gas tank detonated and the world went orange. McCarter had ordered his teammates to hug trees. They were mostly cringing as heat washed up the mountainside and black smoke followed in billowing waves. James had taken cover behind the sauna but the sauna was now on fire. Encizo burst from the house and was vaguely smoking as he ran out and hurled himself into the stationary lap pool.
McCarter watched the tail rotor of the enemy chopper slowly turn as heat rose through it. The chopper’s blackened tail boom tilted through the roof of the burning house where the chimney used to be. The house was burning out of control. McCarter spoke into his link. “Jack, do we have movement?”
“You have ashes settling,” Grimaldi returned. “Flawless victory.”
“Phoenix, sound off!”
Everyone complied from behind their smoldering tree. Encizo rose from the lap pool and shot a thumbs-up.
McCarter surveyed his team. “Where’s Nick?”
James and Manning snapped up their K guns to watch their flanks.
Propenko limped out of the burning safe house, the enemy UAV’s fuselage halves clamped beneath his arm trailing scorched wires and guts. “I am figuring you are still wanting this.”
“You bet, bubba!” Hawkins said.
McCarter was duly impressed but stayed on mission. “Jack?”
“Lead chopper is gone. I wanted a piece of him but he has headed straight north into the Swedish hinterland. You want me to pursue or do you want extraction?”
There was very little way Phoenix Force could wander down the mountain after a gunfight, ghost helicopter crash and a flaming cabin. McCarter could already hear police and emergency vehicle sirens down in Kalmar proper.
“Jack? We need extraction now.”
“Where to? Swedish police channels are blowing up, much less Swedish air traffic control. My range is severely limited. Norway? Denmark? Pick a Baltic republic. They are all about incursions!”
“Poland,” McCarter decided.
Grimaldi was unusually flabbergasted. “You want me to fly you back across the Baltic into Poland?”
“Right back to Gdansk,” McCarter affirmed, and he felt good about it. “It’s the last thing any idiot we are dealing with will ever expect.”
The Annex, Stony Man Farm
“Wow!” Akira Tokaido proclaimed. “Just…wow.”
The insides of the little UAV Phoenix Force had captured in Gdansk were even more impressive in person. Phoenix Force had managed to get the unmanned vehicle’s remains delivered to the United States Embassy in Stockholm and a private courier jet had gotten them to the United States in just under twenty-four hours. Tokaido, Kurtzman, Huntington Wethers and “Gadgets” Schwarz might as well have been in an operating theater.
The slightly scorched and smoke-stained patient had taken half a dozen steel fléchettes, but the damage had done nothing to mar the UAV’s majesty in the eyes of everyone assembled. Save one. Able Team happened to be in-house and Carl “Ironman” Lyons stood like a stone Buddha as the geek talk flew fast and thick. He finally began to lose patience with all the oohing and ahhing.
“So, can Phoenix trace any of it?” Lyons inquired. The Able Team leader was the one Stony Man member who had been a policeman rather than a soldier before he had been tapped by the Farm. He had risen to the rank of detective, and he was very good at it. “Can I?”
Wethers stood tall and stretched from all the hunching over the table. The distinguished, brilliant, black university professor was a key member of the Stony Man Farm cybernetics team. If you were one of the bad guys, Hunt Wethers turning his mind upon you and your operation as a problem that needed solving probably meant your ass. “Not exactly, Carl.”
“What do you mean, not exactly?”
“It means, technically, these components are untraceable.”
Lyons blinked. “What, it’s a People’s Republic knock-off and there are no serial numbers? We’ve dealt with that before. There’s a factory someplace that manufactured this stuff, and they will have left their stink all over it.”
Wethers shook his head. “Not this time.”
“You’re saying there’s no factory?”
“Not precisely, no.”
“It wasn’t manufactured?”
“No.”
Lyons shrugged. “You’re saying some closet-case, geek genius just built it in his garage out of pipe cleaners, bubble gum and baling wire? Hunt, even pipe cleaners, bubble gum and baling wire have a trail. I know, I’ve followed them.”
“You’re exactly right, Carl. Except that this exceptional little machine was not manufactured or cobbled together by some—” Wethers rolled his eyes “—geek genius in his garage.”
“You’re saying it was conjured out of thin air?”
“Exactly!” Wethers smiled happily as if Lyons were a student who was slowly but surely bringing his grades up and just might graduate on time. “Every last piece of that UAV, from stem to stern, motors to rotors, GPS, CPU—you name it—guidance, flight controls and the fuselage itself, were all conjured out of thin air.”
Lyons’s blond brows