Season of Harm. Don Pendleton

acted on instinct. She emptied her Glock in the direction of the catwalk as she ran for the cover of the nearest benches, diving beneath one and colliding with the cardboard cartons of drugs and DVD cases. She grunted as her shoulder hit the stack of boxes, then rolled, bullets tearing up the table above. Several rounds struck the cartons, scattering fine white mist in every direction as the bags of heroin were punctured.

      From her position, Carrol could see the exit, the very door whose lock the team had broken so casually just minutes before. It was so close and yet so impossibly far. With bullets striking the table, the floor, and burning through the air all around her, she pushed herself to her feet and ran for the door, her Glock useless and locked open, no thought of reloading or fighting back. Blind flight instinct kicked in as the chaos around her became total. She saw another of the armed agents die scant feet away as she ran.

      If only she could make the car. If only she could get to the radio. If only she could call for backup. There was still a chance.

      The hammer blow to her chest felt like a cinder block against her ribs. Her knees buckled. She felt herself falling, the floor taking a thousand years to come up, everything happening so slowly…

      She saw stars in her vision as the floor hit her face. The pain was a distant sensation, hardly significant. Some part of her was able to process that she had been shot. How many times and how badly she didn’t know. She felt warm blood on her cheek; she tasted it in her mouth. She thought, as she floated, disconnected from her body, that she had broken her nose in the fall. She tried to push herself to her feet and could not. She couldn’t feel her legs.

      The agent who had gone down in front of her stared back at her, eyes glassy in death. Carrol tried desperately to think, to act, as her mind clouded over with pain and then numbness. Her hand struggled to find the inner pocket of her suit jacket.

      The gunfire died away. Thawan’s men filed down from the catwalk and began moving from body to body. A single shot rang out, and then another, from opposite sides of the warehouse. The shooters were killing the survivors. Those workers unharmed in the gunfight were being herded to one side of the workspace. The wounded workers were shot dead with the same casual disregard the gunmen had shown the FBI agents.

      “Now, move, move,” Thawan was ordering the remaining workers, who looked at him with wide-eyed terror. “Collect the boxes. Collect the drugs. Everything must be packed and made ready for shipment. Gig!”

      One of the gunmen, an even smaller, misshapen man with a scar across his face, hurried forward, cradling his Kalashnikov.

      “Yes, boss.”

      “Call for the trucks. We must move up the timetable.”

      “That will take time, boss. The schedule is complicated. We will have to rearrange the drops.”

      “Gig Tranh,” Thawan said with an exaggerated sigh, “did I ask for your opinion?”

      “No, boss.”

      “Then do as I tell you!” Thawan shouted, waving his .45 to punctuate the point.

      “Yes, boss.” The small man scuttled off, pulling a wireless phone from his BDU jacket as he did so.

      “You and you,” Thawan pointed to the nearest frightened workers. “Come here. You will help me search the bodies. We will take everything of value. Guns, ammunition. Their wallets. Their watches. Also, I want their badges. One never knows when such things will be of value.”

      Agent Carrol, against the increasing, crushing weight of her limbs, managed to drag her own wireless phone from her jacket. Thawan was moving back and forth across the hazy field of her vision. She had one chance. She could feel her life slipping away; could feel her hold on consciousness ebbing. From what little she could see from the floor, it did not appear that any of the other FBI agents had survived. If they had, they would be killed. It was only luck that nobody had gotten to her yet.

      She had to live long enough to let someone know, to get out word of what had happened. If only Thawan would move back into view…

      Thawan stopped, turned and looked straight at her.

      She snapped the picture with her phone’s camera option.

      “Well, well,” Thawan said. He walked to her deliberately, not hurrying, seemingly not at all concerned. “What do you think you are doing?”

      Carrol could feel her vision turning gray at the edges. The sound of Thawan’s voice was hollow in her ears, as if he spoke through a metal pipe.

      She hit Send, transmitting the MMS message to the first contact in her phone’s address book.

      Thawan reached down and snatched the phone from her. He took notice of the empty Glock still clutched in her other hand. Contemptuously, he kicked her pistol aside. Then he examined the phone.

      “Well,” he said, shaking his head, “it appears you will not be calling for help. Even if you had, pretty lady—” he smiled, showing rotted, uneven teeth “—it would do no good. We will be gone before anyone arrives. You have died for nothing.” He dropped the phone to the floor and stomped it with one booted foot. It took several tries, but he was finally able to crush the phone, snapping it into several pieces.

      “You…” Carrol managed to say, her breath coming in short rasps now. “You…won’t…”

      “Won’t what, pretty lady?” Thawan smiled. “Won’t get away with it? Won’t escape? Won’t walk over the bodies of your dead fascist pig brothers and escape? I will, and more.” He squatted and took her face in his left hand. His right still held the .45. Holding her chin and jaw, he moved her head from side to side. “Such a shame. Such a waste. You are really not so bad-looking, you know? We could have had some fun, my boys and I. But no,” he said and let her go. She collapsed, now staring directly at the ceiling. “No, you are too far gone. But not so far gone that I will not help you there.”

      The last thing Agent Carrol saw was Thawan standing over her, the barrel of the .45 impossibly large as he aimed it between her eyes.

      The muzzle-blast was very bright.

       CHAPTER TWO

      Stony Man Farm

      In the War Room at Stony Man Farm, the stern-looking and apparently disembodied face of Hal Brognola stared from one of the plasma wall screens, twice as big as life. Across from the screen, seated near one end of the long conference table, Barbara Price tapped keys on a slim notebook computer.

      “How about now, Hal?” she asked.

      “Yes, I can hear you.” Brognola nodded, his disembodied voice amplified by the wall speakers positioned around the room. Price tapped a key to lower the volume slightly, bringing the big Fed’s virtual presence to something closer to normal. The microphone on Brognola’s end of the scrambled connection was producing some feedback, which Price eliminated with the stroke of a key.

      “You forgot,” Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman said, rolling into the room in his wheelchair, “to ask him to say, ‘Testing, one, two, three.’ Hardly a dignified state in which to find the director of the Sensitive Operations Group.”

      “What can I say?” Brognola said, his voice dry. “I’m a man of the people.”

      Price nodded. The big Fed was broadcasting from his office on the Potomac, roughly eighty miles away in Washington, D.C. Even through the scrambled link, she could tell that Brognola was forcing the humor. The strain was visible around his eyes. It would not be the first time she had seen his image on the screen and worried for his health. Brognola drove his people hard, but he drove himself much harder.

      Kurtzman rolled into position next to Price’s chair and put his heavy stainless, industrial-size coffee mug on the conference table. “It’s a mystery to me,” he said, “how the settings on that connection change from conference to conference.”

      “Goes with the territory, Bear,” Price said. “The