Deadly Payload. Don Pendleton

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      W HEN 138 POUNDS OF LASER-GUIDED missile landed, even if only fifteen pounds of it was made of high explosives, it made an impression.

      The impact and detonation kicked up a wind that blew harshly over the heads of McCarter and his partners. The convoy itself was rocked as riflemen standing guard in the open and their pickups were lifted and hurled by a concussion wave that traveled at 26,000 feet per second. The tractor-trailer rigs shook mightily, but their enormous bulk had protected them from being flung around like children’s toys. A column of dust and smoke rose from the impact crater, and bodies were strewed about. A pickup that had been two yards from the Copperhead’s landing point was compressed as if it were an empty beer can, and rolled toward the beach. Other trucks were simply flipped to varying degrees.

      While some of the drivers inside might have survived, McCarter felt confident that those inside the crushed pickup kicked toward the Mediterranean like a gigantic metal beach ball were instantly dead. Rushing from behind cover with his sound-suppressed Browning in fist, McCarter was first into action. Manning and Hawkins were only heartbeats behind him, their own weapons at the ready.

      The Phoenix Force commander charged toward the remnants of the convoy. A stunned rifleman jerked to his hands and knees, wagging his head to shake out the cobwebs. McCarter, not needing to have an armed soldier at his back, cleared those cobwebs away with a fast double-tap of Para bellum rounds, coring the gunner’s skull. Hawkins and Manning sighted other potential enemies, ripping suppressed fire into them before they could return to their senses and form a defense of their Predator ground-control operation. It was fast and brutal butcher’s work, but considering that the odds against them could still be twenty against three, there was no doubts slowing the three professional warriors.

      The closer to the blast crater they got, the less movement they encountered, though McCarter paused for a half step at the sight of one survivor. A soldier guarding the convoy gasped, holding the almost skeletal remains of his right arm out to the Briton. The Arab’s face was a sticky red mess and his jaw worked up and down, unintelligible sounds waiting through shredded lips. McCarter hammered three shots into the ghastly figure, ending the man’s suffering as he continued in his hard charge toward the trailer that Manning had identified as the main control center.

      Here, the guards had managed to recover much more quickly, even if they did sway uneasily on their feet, senses reeling from the hammer blow dropped by an angry god into their laps. McCarter dropped to one knee and pivoted like a human turret, his Browning sweeping enemy heads, trigger breaking like a glass rod every time his front sight crossed a body. At six shots a second, he wasn’t going to approximate the rate of fire of a submachine gun, but each round went exactly where McCarter needed it to go, faces exploding as 9 mm bullets smashed into them with blinding speed.

      With eight shots dead on target in a shade over a second, McCarter rose from his kneeling position and continued his rush. In the heartbeat between kneeling and accelerating to a full run, he automatically replenished the partially emptied Browning with a new 13-round magazine.

      Manning and Hawkins raked the flanking survivors among the guard force with their own weapons, giving McCarter the freedom to continue toward the operations control trailer. He was three feet from the top of the steps at the back of it when the door slammed open, a dazed, bloodied technician staggering into view. The Briton lashed out with his left hand, grabbing a fistful of the man’s shirt and shoving him back into the control center, the Browning in his right chugging two shots through the technician’s heart. The flap holster on the man’s hip might only have been for show, but he was armed and was going to send a weapon-laden flight of drones to attack an Israeli city. Cored through the heart, the technician was now a lifeless shield of flesh and bone as the Briton heaved him through the doorway.

      Someone inside had some presence of mind and cut loose with a Makarov pistol, but the low-powered 9 mm bullets couldn’t penetrate the dead man McCarter held in front of him. Most of the lights inside the trailer had been knocked out, only one bulb illuminating the far end, though liquid crystal display screens threw a soft but dim blue glow over the interior. Shaken technicians struggled to get out of the way of the Phoenix Force commander’s stampede through their quarters. The Briton tapped off three shots at the gunman who’d drilled his own dead comrade. One shot was a miss, but the second and third shots were as straight as a line of rivets, cutting two gory holes in the shooter’s throat. Head nearly severed, the armed technician flopped across his computer table, keyboard and liquid crystal monitor crashing to the floor of the trailer.

      A drone operator lunged at McCarter from behind, his arms spread wide to grab the wily fox-faced Briton. Instead of catching him in a bear hug, the technician caught the point of McCarter’s elbow in his solar plexus with bone-breaking force. Suddenly unable to breathe, the man collapsed to his knees, giving McCarter a moment of freedom to shove his corpse shield into a second feisty drone operator who tried to swing his chair as a club. Both men’s bodies collapsed to the floor, McCarter pinning the chair-wielding technician down forever with two rounds from his Browning.

      The choking operator reached out, trying to grab McCarter again, and this time the Stony Man commando whirled and snapped his heel into the conspirator’s nose, crushing it flat and driving the bone into his brain. Four down, he thought, looking around the shadowy trailer, scanning for more opponents. He’d almost completed a full circle of his search when two Makarov bullets stung his armored load-bearing vest. The enemy gunman had some training, and that saved the former SAS commando, since most people concentrate on the center of mass when shooting. McCarter’s center was protected by Kevlar and polymer mesh chain link calibrated to stop a .44 Magnum or AK-47 bullet. Lightning reflexes spurred the Phoenix Force leader to return fire, zipping five shots into the gunman from crotch to sternum.

      Opened up like a gutted calf, the last drone operator fell to his knees, folding over his spilling entrails and dying.

      “Report in,” McCarter called over his com-link.

      The others reported “all clear.”

      “T.J., bring the sat phone in here and hook these control computers up to the Farm,” the Briton ordered.

      He looked around the trailer, at the five bodies. The death toll for this mission was sure to climb. And given that even the technicians were willing to fight to the death, this conflict was going to be brutal.

      McCarter took a deep breath and reloaded his partially spent Browning.

      “So what else is bloody new?” he asked tiredly, holstering his pistol.

       CHAPTER THREE

      The Mercedes SUV bounced raggedly over the muddy trail through the Darien. A mountainous rain forest that formed an almost impenetrable border between Panama and Colombia, the Darien was a formidable force. Even though northern Colombia received constant radar scanning from various drug-enforcement agencies, СКАЧАТЬ