Unified Action. Don Pendleton

be just as bad,” Schwarz pointed out.

      “Gangs won’t cause as much trouble in the long run,” Lyons countered. “With the dead bodies and all,” he added.

      Schwarz smirked. “Thanks for clearing that up. For a moment I thought you meant they’d be able to trace all the bibles we’d be handing out back to the Farm.”

      Lyons ignored him, turned back toward the gate. His eyes narrowed as he sized the men up. “I’d rather bribe ’em,” he admitted.

      “The safehouse’ll have operational funds but for now we’re fresh off the plane. We either get out of this gate or we fail. It’s one or the other.”

      “Don’t I know,” Lyons said. “I just hope Hal’s contacts will pull through.”

      “Maybe if the government wasn’t under siege…” Schwarz trailed off.

      “I guess if I don’t like it I can always go back to being a cop.” Lyons turned his head and spit on a beetle longer than his thumb as it scurried by on the concrete. The air was so damp from the humidity he felt as if he was being water boarded.

      “Our target is out there,” Schwarz reminded him. “I kinda doubt they’re going to let us just track him down. I got long odds on us getting our ticket out that gate.”

      Lyons nodded. He lifted one fist the size of a canned ham and squeezed it with his other hand. The knuckles popped like gunshots. “There’s an American in trouble,” the ex–LAPD detective said. “Bad day to be a Dominican customs cop.”

      “Have you seen this place?” Schwarz grunted. “Every day is a bad day for those poor sons of bitches.”

      Blancanales nodded, then thanked the minor bureaucrat he was addressing. The man walked away and Blancanales came toward them. He looked jaunty and upbeat as he approached, but that was just the man’s basic personality. Lyons knew before the stocky Puerto Rican said anything that it was a wash.

      “Did Barb call us?” Blancanales asked without preamble.

      “No updates, no frag orders, no reprieves,” Schwarz answered. “We either give here or roll out that gate, brother.”

      “Oh, we’re going out that gate,” Lyons said.

      Kyrgyzstan

       0430 am local time

      THE ISOSCELES-TRIANGLE-shaped delta aircraft streaked across central Asian airspace. Four pulse detonation engines hammered the flying wedge forward at Mach 5. Normally staffed with two flight officers, one pilot and one reconnaissance officer, the converted aircraft was piloted by Stony Man ace Jack Grimaldi, who flew solo on this mission.

      Cameras, sensors, remote imagers and central processing units had been removed and the body retrofitted to provide a drop platform for airborne insertion. In the dark, claustrophobic hold Phoenix Force waited, attached to oxygen until the GPS system alerted them to their proximity to the jump zone.

      A tiny red light blinked once, then shifted to amber. Inside the transport chamber the five commandos felt the airframe shudder under the stress of declining speed. The oxygen system was pumping pure oxygen into the Phoenix Force operators, flushing nitrogen from their blood systems in preparation for the drop to offset hypoxia complications.

      On the instrument panel the jump light clicked over from amber to green. Grimaldi reached out and flipped the toggle switch, activating the hydraulic ramp. Within seconds the team was gone into the central Asian night.

      The five black figures were invisible against the dark backdrop of the night sky. Unit commander David McCarter, himself a jumpmaster from the elite British Special Air Service, kept a close eye on the plunging members of his team.

      Using his altimeter as a guide, McCarter gave the signal to disengage from supplemental oxygen. The air that high above the black-and-gray checkerboard of the landscape was chill as the commandos breathed it in.

      At the predetermined altitude McCarter gave the signal and the loose circle of paratroopers broke away, turning into corkscrew spiral led by the British soldier. The black silk parachute of combat diver Rafael Encizo billowed up and popped open to begin the deployment sequence.

      The four other members of Phoenix dropped past the paragliding Cuban-American and in quick succession ex–Navy SEAL Calvin James, then Canadian special forces veteran Gary Manning pulled their ripcords. McCarter and T. J. Hawkins dropped below the rest before the Texan and former Delta Force operator deployed his own parachute.

      McCarter turned in his free fall and yanked his own ripcord. His chute unfurled and snapped open, jerking him up short. Arrayed behind and above him the team continued its descent in a long, staggered but symmetrical line.

      McCarter led the paragliding procession using his wrist-mounted GPS unit to guide the team down to a narrow plateau on a ridge of low, sparsely wooded hills set above a road.

      He used his time under the canopy to do a last-minute reconnaissance of the area as he dropped. Off to the northeast he was able to clearly distinguish a long line of headlights coming from the northwest. He felt a certain grim satisfaction as he realized his prey was heading directly toward the guns of his team.

      He flared the chute as he touched down, then absorbed the impact up through the soles of his old Russian army boots. McCarter, like the rest of Phoenix Force, was dressed in a motley collection of drab, local civilian garb and Soviet-era Russian army uniform items. Their weapons were Russian, their faces covered in beards, and their equipment from explosives to communications and medical items were common black market items available in the arms bazaars of Armenian criminal syndicates.

      Moving quickly, McCarter turned and began collecting his chute, rolling it into a tight ball as the rest of his men landed around him. Hawkins quickly unzipped an SVD sniper rifle from its cushioned carryall and powered up the illumination optics on the night scope.

      As the other three members began to cache the drop gear, Hawkins went to the edge of the windswept gravel landing zone to pull security while McCarter worked his scrambled communications uplink.

      “Phoenix Actual to Stony Farm,” he barked.

      “Go for Stony,” Price replied immediately.

      “We’re on the ground and initiating movement to target,” McCarter informed the woman.

      “Good copy,” Price acknowledged. “We have eyes on,” she assured the field commander.

      Above their heads the Stony Man’s own Keyhole satellite had spun into geosynchronous orbit and the NASA cameras began focusing tightly on the broken terrain with a lens capability so powerful it could read the license plate of a speeding vehicle at night. The ghostly white figures of Phoenix Force appeared on Price’s heads-up display back in the Virginia command and control center.

      On the stark, exposed finger of the central Asian topography McCarter turned as his team cached the last of their jump gear and began to assemble and ready their primary weapons. Besides Hawkins and his SVD sniper rifle, the massive, thickly muscled frame of Gary Manning was adorned with a 7.62 mm RPK machine gun. The short fire-plug profile of Rafael Encizo came up behind the Canadian, a Type 50 submachine gun his hands. The compact weapon was a prolific Chinese knock-off of the Soviet-era PPSh-41 SMG, and Encizo used it to supplement the RPG-7 launcher he carried along with a sling of HE rockets.

      Calvin James was the second half of Phoenix Force’s rocket team. He was also armed with an RPG-7 and Type 50. For his part David McCarter would be using a cut-down AKS-74 outfitted with a black market M-203 40 mm grenade launcher.

      “We’re ready to roll,” Manning informed McCarter.

      McCarter nodded, then spoke into his uplink. “How we looking out there, Hawk?”

      “All clear on the approach route,” he answered.

      “Copy. Bound forward one hundred yards into overwatch and will move into position.”

      “Hawk out.”