Seismic Surge. Don Pendleton

fragments thrown off by the grenade, but the pressure wave struck him like a baseball bat and even the protection of his helmet couldn’t keep him from staggering dazedly into the open.

      Blancanales hated that he had to be so ruthless toward the stunned foe, but the armored assassin still had a firm grip on his weapon and would recover his senses within a few moments. Taking aim, Blancanales opened fire and peppered the gunman’s chest with a full-auto salvo. While the action was tactically sound, despite its ruthlessness, Blancanales was not being unnecessarily cruel. He was simply stopping a would-be killer from continuing to target federal investigators.

      Just because Able Team was undercover as Department of Justice employees didn’t mean that they weren’t actual Feds. This was as much self-defense as rooting out the truth behind who initiated the assassinations of the OSHA investigators. Nine innocent men, all unarmed, had died by fire to keep a secret here in the Norfolk boatyard.

      Clearly the shooters who had arrived and immediately opened fire were not police officers. Furthermore they would definitely know what was going on and who had likely been behind the others’ deaths.

      Blancanales held off moving on to another target, keeping cover between himself and the other gunmen. These shooters were wearing armor, so he waited to be sure that the 4.6 mm bullets from his machine pistol had been able to punch through to his enemy’s vitals.

      It turned out that Blancanales had made the right choice, because the staggered killer scrambled back to his feet a second time, but he wasn’t standing still to be the target for further full-auto hammering. Even as the gunman retreated, two more riflemen opened up, their rifles chattering and pelting the hunk of rubble that Blancanales used as a shield. Unfortunately for them, they missed, bullets smashing against mass too dense for their 5.56 mm rounds to penetrate, and Blancanales had mapped out a line of retreat in case he was attacked from that vector.

      Blancanales paused just enough to unclip another of his grenades from a small fanny pack. He plucked the cotter pin and released the spoon, igniting the blaster’s fuse before hurling it toward the rattle of enemy weapons. There was a brief pause in the shooting, accompanied by an almost comical cry of “Shit!”

      The humor of the moment was punctuated by the earth-shattering roar of the grenade’s detonation, body parts spiraling away from the source of the well-placed blast. A distant explosion hadn’t been able to shred through a steel helmet and trauma plates, but the enemy commandos didn’t have that kind of hard shell on their legs. Even if they did, a sheet of kinetic force severed the limbs where the joints in the armor were weakest.

      “We’re hoping to get one or two alive, remember,” Schwarz said grimly.

      “Acknowledged,” Blancanales replied. “Let’s hope they have the same orders.”

      The stunned and wounded gunner, having survived two attempts at putting him down, became Blancanales’s focus. He was leaving a blood trail, which meant at least one of the prior attacks had caused him injury. Once hurt, he’d be easier to take down.

      With his target in sight, Blancanales rushed forward, keeping out of the fields of fire of the enemy gunners, zagging toward the downed commando. He reloaded the MP-7 on the run, the magazine-in-grip design making it easier for his left hand to find the well that his right was wrapped around. It was so easy he could do it blindfolded, and since he hadn’t run the SMG into slide-lock, he knew he had a round chambered.

      A gunman edged into the open in front of the wily veteran commando, 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,