Extermination. Don Pendleton

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СКАЧАТЬ wondering about some military stuff that went through here.”

      Lyons nodded. His eyes burrowed into Scalia, who shifted uneasily in his seat and swallowing hard. Lyons knew that while there were ways to get information out of people—and he’d been forced to utilize torture at times for the sake of last-minute expedience—the best interrogators got their answers just by force of will. These types of interrogations were Lyons’s favorite. There was no blood, there was no moral quandary, and the answers weren’t the first lies screamed that made the pain stop. The Able Team commander was not a murderer or a sadist; he was a warrior and a seeker of justice.

      “Well,” Scalia began, “we took the shipment and waited for them to bring their own trucks. We didn’t look inside, especially since the bosses made sure we didn’t fuck it up. They’re scared.”

      “But you know who I come from, don’t you?” Lyons asked.

      Scalia looked down, breaking eye contact. His bald dome was beaded with nervous sweat that rolled down his forehead in rivulets. “I don’t want to say his name.”

      “You do know my friend Mack,” Lyons said.

      Scalia visibly shuddered, his cheeks tingeing green as if he were fighting off a particularly violent bout of food poisoning. “Th…th…they said he was dead.”

      “You think you can kill the devil made flesh, come to collect the souls of you damned petty thugs?” Lyons asked, his voice dropping to a deep, rumbly baritone, tapping every movie about exorcism he’d ever seen as a boy. “The living spirit of murder and terror does not die, no matter how much you shoot him or burn him.”

      The acrid stench of urine suddenly filled the air as Scalia messed himself, tears joining the cascade of sweat droplets crawling down his face. “Oh, God…”

      “If you had any pull with Him, I would never have found you,” Lyons said, standing, leaning forward with his knuckles on the desktop. He was bent close to Scalia’s face, his growl low and unholy. “Confession is your only salvation.”

      Scalia flinched, one eye squinted shut, the other a mere sliver. “Please, Father in Heaven…”

      “Now you find religion, after moving illegal automatic weapons and drugs across the country?” Lyons asked. “Your hypocrisy makes you an even more tasty treat.”

      “Okay…okay…we sent out the crates to Idaho,” Scalia said. “We figured they were machine guns for the militias.” Lyons nodded.

      “To make their own state. You know how crazy they are,” Scalia said.

      “But they are honest in their hatred, if inaccurate as to the cause of their failures,” Lyons returned. “Idaho. Do you know where?”

      “Just that the drivers let it drop that they were headed in that direction,” Scalia said. “They wanted to know the road conditions and such….”

      “How do you know that they weren’t leaving a false lead?” Lyons asked, easing back down.

      “Because I called the slip in, and an hour after that driver left, his corpse was found in a Dumpster three miles away,” Scalia answered. “These fuckers didn’t mess around.”

      “A Dumpster. You and your people take care of the body?” Lyons asked.

      “Not my department,” Scalia replied. “But his ass didn’t go to the morgue.”

      “How long ago was this?” Lyons asked.

      Scalia’s eyes widened.

      “How. Long. Ago?” Lyons repeated with a growl for each word.

      “Three days,” Scalia said. “So they should be in Idaho, even if they made rest stops, though I doubt it. There were multiple drivers for each rig.”

      Lyons grimaced. “We’ll find them.”

      “And what about me?” Scalia asked.

      “You can make it easier for me to keep an eye on this operation, or the next,” Lyons said.

      “Are you kidding me?” Scalia quizzed. “They know that I talked to you…”

      Lyons picked up Scalia’s 1911 and let out a shrill, frightened scream, firing the entire magazine through the door. Once the slide locked open, he turned to Scalia. “This is going to hurt, but you’ll wake up.”

      Scalia was frozen in wide-eyed horror as the big burly blond pulled the biggest revolver he’d ever seen from under his leather jacket. With a flick of the wrist and a sharp, searing flame across his forehead, the mobster’s fears vanished into the calming, accepting embrace of unconsciousness.

      Lyons knew that he wasn’t going to have a lot of time before the security teams would be rushing toward the door. Just to make things more convincing for Scalia, he punched the unconscious man to raise bruises and welts on his face. A couple of shots to the side and the stomach, and he was done with that. Scalia would look like he’d been put through a wringer, and the sound of the beating would be audible through the doors. Lyons just had to make certain that he left witnesses alive.

      That wouldn’t be too difficult for the Able Team leader.

      The first two men through the door entered hard and hot, kicking through the weakened wood of Scalia’s office entrance, pistol-grip shotguns held at the hip and each blasting out a thunder-load of buckshot into the air. Obviously the two men must not have practiced much with 12-gauges without stocks as the recoil jerked the weapons in their grasps, but they’d been counting on the initial bellows of the weapons to cut down enemies in front of them, or the loud roars to act as a stun-shock grenade, overpressure hammering the ears of anyone who’d stayed out of the way.

      Lyons had been standing to the side of the doorway, and he had been prepared enough to have a pair of electronic bud earplugs. They filtered potentially damaging sounds to manageable levels without compromising his ability to hear footsteps in the distance. The guard closest to Lyons looked over his shoulder to see the big blond ex-cop lunge at him. Lyons drove him face-first into Scalia’s desk with a heel strike to the back of his head.

      The other gunner turned in reaction to his partner’s sudden crash, but Lyons was ready with a shotokan side kick that landed under the guard’s sternum with sufficient force to lift the man off his feet before he crashed against the bookshelf behind him. It took a moment for Lyons to be certain that these two could give a corroborating story to their superiors about the assault on Scalia.

      Never one to pass up a free weapon or ammunition, Lyons scooped up a stockless shotgun from the floor. It was a stubby tool, and he readily recognized it as an Ithaca Model 37 Stakeout Shotgun, a tool he’d used before. It only had a thirteen-inch barrel, but that gave it a magazine tube with room enough for four rounds of 12-gauge buck. Lyons also noted that there was a sidesaddle that held six spare shells on the side of the receiver. Lyons took one shell and inserted it into the magazine, then grabbed the other weapon after slinging the first over his shoulder. Making certain that the other shotgun had been topped off, Lyons was ready for serious business. Eighteen rounds of 12-gauge would make busting out of the building much easier.

      He picked up the stomp of feet in the distance and barreled out into the hall, the stubby shotgun easy to maneuver through the doorway. With a hard kick, he entered СКАЧАТЬ