Seismic Surge. Don Pendleton

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СКАЧАТЬ looking to cover his fallen friend. He also happened to have a device that was decidedly not an assault weapon in his hands. Blancanales only barely had a few instants of warning before he dived beneath the twin barbs of an underbarrel-mounted Taser. The wires fell across his shoulders, but as they were insulated to contain the voltage that had been directed toward whatever had been stuck by the pair of darts, the charge in the slender threads was impotent against him.

      That couldn’t be said for the weapon atop the Taser, an M-4 assault rifle. The killer figured that if he couldn’t take Blancanales as a prisoner, then he’d simply open fire and remove him as a threat. Blancanales didn’t sit still for this, however. He rolled onto his back, getting himself out of the path of the initial burst of rifle fire, triggering the H&K MP-7 at the man’s shins. The 4.6 mm bullets didn’t contain a lot of mass, but as they were composed of dense slugs launched at more than 2400 feet per second, they struck the enemy gunner hard, splintering bone and muscle everywhere between his knees and ankles.

      Without the ability to stand, the gunman collapsed onto his stunned friend, going from rescuer to restraint.

      “Ironman!” Blancanales called. “Cover me! Two prisoners at four o’clock.”

      Lyons would know that Blancanales would always put his position at two hours fast; it was one way that Able Team was able to engage in out-loud communication of their location without actually betraying where they actually were in relation to each other. Lyons opened up with his big .357 Magnum, firing three shots rapid-fire, drawing heat away from his partner even as his rounds tagged an enemy in his body armor. Trauma plates deflected the more lethal portion of Lyons’s salvo, but it was enough to convince the gunman to retreat back behind cover.

      Lyons grimaced as he snapped open the cylinder, ejecting his spent brass and feeding in a special 8-round .357 Magnum speed-loader. The gun was back in action in two seconds, but before he left cover, Schwarz was at his side, handing him the MP-7 he’d ceded earlier.

      “We don’t need to use kid gloves anymore. Punch through the armor and finish this fight,” Schwarz said.

      Lyons smirked. “Never would have thought of that myself.”

      He snapped open the stock and folded down the foregrip on the machine pistol. A 20-round magazine sat flush with the bottom of the grip, so he dumped it and slid home a 40-rounder. “What’s the estimate on how many left?”

      Schwarz scanned around. “Three here, but there are still the drivers and vehicle security who could be coming in as backup.”

      “That’s why you dropped off my MP-7,” Lyons said.

      “Gonna head them off,” Schwarz said.

      With that, the electronics genius disappeared from sight. Whatever the brilliant Schwarz had in mind, it would be explosive and deadly.

      “They secure?” Lyons asked Blancanales through his headset.

      “Roger that.”

      “Keep your head down, too,” Lyons ordered.

      With that, he lobbed a pair of flash-bang grenades in the direction of the enemy’s fire. They had split up, two in one group with a long gunner trying to flank. Lyons knew that he wouldn’t have much of an opportunity, even with the blinding and deafening force of the twin shock bombs. The headgear they wore would mitigate much of the force, but Lyons’s throws had been true. He was counting on a close-range burst of light and sound to buy him a few seconds.

      He was up and firing, catching a fleeting touch of the bang. The two gunners he’d targeted as one clump were staggered where they stood, and Lyons poured on the heat from his machine pistol. The 40-round magazine disappeared in the space of seconds, but the Able Team commander had found every weak point in his opponents’ armor, punching bullets deep into their vitals. The lifeless men dropped their weapons, slumping to the ground.

      As they fell, the last of the gunners was recovering from the concussion grenade that had rocked him. That mercenary was on Lyons’s flank, right in his blind spot. With a clear shot and no other enemies in sight, the rifleman took an extra moment to line up on the “vulnerable” Lyons when the thunder and bellow of Blancanales’s Smith and Wesson .45 erupted from ground level.

      The shooter dropped his weapon as two 230-grain slugs struck him in one hip, shattering bone and snapping his pelvis. The twin slugs mushroomed on impact, going from just under half of an inch to a full three quarters of an inch of blossomed lead and copper. The duo of hammer blows tore an ugly, brutal channel through the gunman’s groin, breaking his other hip on the way out.

      Paralyzed, he collapsed, almost face-to-face with the prone Blancanales.

      One more stroke of the trigger, and the ambusher’s face disappeared, imploding under the thunderous impact of a third .45-caliber round.

      Lyons knew that Blancanales had a line of sight on the last of the gunmen, having dealt with the men he’d take prisoner before backing him up.

      In the distance, the unmistakable roar of plastic explosives split the air.

      “You done there?” Lyons asked Schwarz via the headset.

      “Grab a prisoner and rendezvous,” Schwarz answered. “We toss our guys into the back of our van, and Pol drives it to the safe house. We grab the other vehicles and bring them in and rip them apart for forensic evidence.”

      “Sirens,” Blancanales said. “We made a hell of a lot of noise.”

      “Grab one of these fools and let’s go,” Lyons suggested. “Hopefully the Farm’s screwing with police communications so we have a route out of here.”

      “If so, good. If not, I’ll cut us a path without hurting any cops,” Blancanales replied.

      “I’m counting on that.”

      With that, Able Team rushed away from the Norfolk boatyard, prisoners in tow. They were gone with only seconds to spare when the police arrived, looking upon the carnage wrought by their explosive presence.

      In the upcoming days, the Norfolk Police and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service would wonder what caused this brutal spat of violence, but would soon be distracted by yet more violence. Able Team was on the case, and they were up against a deadly conspiracy that was bringing far more to the fight than just guns.

      CHAPTER TWO

      Calvin James and Rafael Encizo checked over the scuba kits of the three partners, David McCarter, Gary Manning and T. J. Hawkins, even as the silo the five men stood within filled with seawater up to their knees. James was a scuba expert thanks to Navy SEAL training, while a lifetime of maritime salvage employment had honed Encizo into a master diver. As such, they took it upon themselves to perform safety checks on the rest of the team’s equipment. It was almost paranoid the way that they double-checked their partner’s preparations, but neither man wanted to take a chance with the lives of their dearest friends.

      “All right, Mom!” T. J. Hawkins quipped as James manhandled his scuba tank. “If you fuss any more over me, I’ll miss the damn bus and you’ll have to drive me to school yourself.”

      “Language, motherfucker!” James snapped back. “I’ll wash your fucking mouth out with soap.”

      This СКАЧАТЬ