Enemies Within. Don Pendleton

grenade launcher—and Mossberg 590 12-gauge pump shotguns with a 20-inch barrel and extended combat magazines, loading double 0 buck and 1-ounce rifled slugs.

      Any heavier munitions would be locked inside the team’s civilian-style Humvee, painted matte-black and parked a block downrange from their intended target on this early morning without moon or stars.

      Benedict Bravo’s commanding officer was Captain Sedgewick Larkin, a sixteen-year veteran, fitted like his other special agents with a set of ATN PVS-7 standard military-issue night-vision goggles and a Bluetooth communication device that permitted conversation at whisper level with the other members of his team. He understood what was at stake and had impressed it on his men: Lieutenant Gregory DuBois, Staff Sergeant Richard Malvern, Staff Sergeant Leo Edwards, Sergeant Edgar Rankin, and Corporal Payton Luce.

      They were the best he had available.

      Larkin could only hope they were good enough.

      Another quick glance at his watch showed the time as 0329. “Sound off,” he ordered, and stood waiting while five voices in descending order of rank confirmed that each was standing by, ready to move.

      That used the better part of half a minute, whereupon Larkin told his strike team, “Do it now!”

      * * *

      Staff Sergeant Edwards had the long split-level’s back door covered, facing South Shore Drive and the Atlantic Ocean, surging dark and vast beyond. His Mossberg 590 weighed close to ten pounds, fully loaded, fitted with ghost ring sights and a bayonet lug for close-quarters combat, though Edwards had passed on mounting the steel, opting instead for Shock Lock breaching rounds to take the door down.

      After the order to advance, he crossed the fifteen yards of grass and pavement in a rush. Angling his Mossberg’s muzzle toward the door lock, a round already chambered and the safety disengaged, Edwards triggered the first shot, then was blinded as the green field of his NVGs suddenly flushed brilliant white.

      The door exploded, some kind of propellant charge behind it, striking Edwards with sufficient force to rip the shotgun from his grasp, slamming him over backward in a daze, blood gushing from his broken nose to soak the woolen balaclava. Groping for his M-9, he had nearly reached it when the hazy figure of a man approached, stood over him and aimed a sound-suppressed assault rifle at the staff sergeant’s face.

      “Night, night,” the stranger said. “You lose.”

      * * *

      Lieutenant Gregory DuBois heard the explosion, knew their setup on the split-level had gone to shit, and went ahead regardless. He still had work to do—they all did—and until the captain called them off, he would proceed as planned.

      His target was a set of sliding-glass doors that granted access to the layout’s finished basement on the north end of the house. The lieutenant rushed it, triggering a 3-round out of his M-4 carbine, braced for anything he could think of since the first explosive detonation on the premises. So far, he didn’t know if it had been a booby trap of some kind, planted when their targets flew the coop, or if the men they’d come to take down still remained inside.

      In either case, until he had eyes on the enemy or empty rooms, he had to play his hand the same. Assume there was trouble of the life-or-death variety lying in store for him and the other members of his team, fight through it and, for God’s sake, come out on the other end alive.

      His tumbling rounds opened the broad glass doors, their tinted panes shattering and cascading like broken sheets of ice. DuBois was ten feet out and closing when he spotted muzzle-flashes well back in the basement recreation room and felt the high-velocity projectiles rip into him below his Mod Tac vest, snapping his femurs, shattering his pelvis. Stunning pain engulfed his legs as he toppled forward, sprawling facedown on the manicured grass.

      Somehow he kept his grip on the M-4 and tried to spot the opposition with his carbine’s Burris Optics 5×36 mm AR-536 Red Dot Sight, but they had him zeroed first. A final muzzle-flash flared in front of him, driving a bullet into the lieutenant’s forehead, and his world went blank.

      * * *

      Staff Sergeant Malvern and Sergeant Rankin rushed the southeast corner of the split-level rental together, targeting a door that should grant access to the kitchen if the floor plans they’d obtained from Pender County’s clerk in Burgaw were entirely up to date and accurate.

      Rankin had loaded deer slugs in his Mossberg, never mind nonlethal breaching rounds, and Malvern had an M-651 grenade in the M-203 launcher slung beneath his carbine’s barrel. The gren contained fifty-three grams of CS gas mixture with a burn time of twenty-five seconds. To defeat the gas, both sergeants wore half-mask respirators covering their balaclavas, adding to the alien appearance of their black night-vision goggles.

      All they had to do was crash the door, then let it fly and make their way inside.

      No sweat.

      That was, until it all went straight to hell.

      Rankin was set to blow the kitchen door when someone on the inside tripped a charge and blew it outward. The sergeant was quick enough to duck and dodge the flying door, but Malvern wasn’t, grunting as a corner struck his shooting arm and shoulder, spinning him, disarming him and sprawling him supine across the sloping lawn. Rankin triggered a deer slug and pumped the Mossberg’s slide-action to put another in the shotgun’s chamber when the gaping kitchen doorway came alive with muzzle-flashes. Automatic weapons spit full-metal-jacket rounds at the two would-be intruders.

      Rankin guessed the shooters had M-249 Squad Automatic Weapons or some other light machine guns on the same pattern. He couldn’t match their cyclic rate of fire with his shotgun. It hardly mattered since the next two slugs doubled him over, nearly disemboweling him.

      The sergeant collapsed onto the grass, saw Malvern struggling to rise before another burst sheared off his face and finished him.

      Before he died, Rankin rasped into his Bluetooth, “Two down, southeast. Abort if possible.”

      * * *

      “Abort, my ass!” Captain Larkin broadcast to four dead men, catching a gloomy nod from Corporal Luce, stationed at his side. “We finish it or go down trying.”

      “Yes, sir!” Luce answered without hesitation.

      “Load an HE round in your launcher,” Larkin ordered, watching as Luce obeyed him with an easy, practiced motion. “No more talk of bringing any subjects in alive.”

      “No, sir!” The young man sounded braver than he most likely felt.

      “On my mark. Three...two...one...”

      They sent both HE rounds hurtling toward the structure’s front windows, aiming for a space the floor plans labeled as its living room. The rounds shattered glass within a split second of each other, vanished into darkness, then exploded with a double flash and clap of man-made thunder that cleared out the window frames and left the front door sagging on its hinges.

      “Forward!” Larkin snapped, trusting the corporal to keep pace on his left as he advanced. They only had each other now, and while he couldn’t picture any happy ending to the raid, Larkin was bound to see it through.

      It was the only way he knew to soldier, after all.

      The light machine guns caught them in converging streams of fire when they were still a dozen yards or so from the house, hot streams of bullets wobbling and crisscrossing in the night.

      Larkin heard Luce cry out in pain but didn’t see him fall. By then he was too busy stumbling, going down himself, two shattered legs unable to support his weight for another shambling step. He hit the grass chin-first, surprised it wasn’t softer on impact. Before he had a chance to raise his M-4 and return fire, bullets rippled past and through him, putting out his lights with only time enough to hope that Luce’s end would be as relatively merciful.

      * * *

      As dogs began to bay and yammer through the neighborhood, two figures left the smoky split-level