Critical Intelligence. Don Pendleton

he quoted.

      Hawkins snorted as he quickly placed the timers and started the countdown. “Fire in the hole, people,” he warned.

      The entrance into the bunker was a short set of steps leading four feet down into the ground with sandbag walls built up on the side. Moving quickly and under covering fire from the support units, they peeled back from the doorway.

      The charges went off with a loud, flat bang, and black smoke rolled out. Immediately automatic weapons fire burned out of the opening from inside the bunker.

      “Hawk!” McCarter ordered.

      The lanky Texan rushed down the steps, slid into a corner of the doorway and produced an awkward-looking assault rifle from a sling carry on his torso.

      The CornerShot Assault Pistol Rifle boasted a steel hinge that allowed the weapon to be folded into an L-shape and fired around corners. The version used by Hawkins now had a digital folding heads-up-display screen and handgun at the end of the weapon capable of firing 5.56 mm ammunition.

      Coolly, Hawkins swung the weapon around the corner into the teeming confusion inside the bunker. A shape loomed up, filling the screen. Hawkins pulled his trigger three times and the shape went down.

      “Do you have eyes on?” McCarter demanded.

      “Negative,” Hawkins replied. He snapped the weapon back around in the other direction. “Hold on!” he said. “There! I have eyes on Target Pusan Kim chi. He’s at position fourteen-thirty.”

      “Fourteen-thirty,” the team repeated out loud, using the twenty-four-hour indicator for two-thirty on a clock.

      McCarter, grenade primed, chucked the little hand bomb in a slap-shot maneuver around the corner as Hawkins folded back out and switched out weapons.

      There were curses in Spanish and a cry of terror, then the stun device went off with a brilliant flash and a deafening bang.

      “Go! Go! Go!” McCarter barked.

      Hawkins charged down the steps into the smoke, weapon up, visor in place. He stepped across the threshold and button-hooked to the left. Two steps behind him Calvin James rushed into the room, twisting to the right. McCarter tapped Rafael Encizo on the shoulder, then charged in after Hawkins and James.

      Encizo rushed down the steps into the hellbox.

      Behind them Manning held their direct six while the guns of Able Team provided overwatch support fire.

      Already pockets of resistance on the compound had begun to fade. Vehicles burned, FARC corpses lay like trash on the ground and Grimaldi’s Blackhawk hovered over the scene, miniguns blazing in sporadic bursts.

      Inside the bunker Hawkins rushed forward.

      Disorganized and wounded FARC guerrillas stumbled past him. He shot two, skipped over their falling bodies and reached the huddled form of Sin-Bok. The North Korean operative looked up and Hawkins dropped a haymaker on his face two inches up from the point of the man’s chin.

      The target dropped, and James rushed forward, spinning around to cover the rest of the room as Hawkins slapped plastic riot cuffs and a dark hood on the Korean. Out of the smoke and dark a screaming FARC officer appeared, a .45 ACP filling his hand.

      The pistol roared, the muzzle-flash illuminating the gloomy bunker like lightning. Two heavy slugs slapped into the concrete above the Korean’s head, and James realized the man had been trying to silence the foreign agent. He shot the FARC officer twice, once low in the stomach and once through the face as he folded.

      “Let’s go!” Hawkins grunted.

      Across the room Encizo and McCarter were clearing the rest of the bunker with ruthless, mechanically murderous proficiency.

      James helped haul the groggy Korean to his feet. He turned away from the man, hand on the pistol grip of his weapon. His eyes scanned the room as they began moving forward, looking for any last-second piece of intelligence or overlooked threat.

      “Damn, hold on!” he shouted.

      Hawkins turned, pushing the Korean down and bringing up his weapon. He jerked around, looking for the threat, but didn’t see anything moving. He looked down and saw what James was looking at.

      The girl was in her underwear and huddled against the wall. A dead FARC soldier lay bleeding in front of her. She looked up at the masked and heavily armed commandos with stark fear.

      “Hey, boss,” Hawkins called to McCarter.

      “Who are you? How did you get here?” James asked the girl in Spanish.

      “What?” McCarter demanded. He looked over. “Shit,” he said simply.

      “My name is Maria,” the girl said. “I’m from the village of San Sebastian. I want to go home, please.”

      “This is mission creep.” McCarter spit.

      “We put her on the Blackhawk,” James said, “turn her over to our South American liaison. They contact a relief agency. No fuss, no muss. Just a chopper ride.”

      McCarter hesitated, even though everyone there knew there was no way they were leaving a helpless teenage girl behind them.

      “Fine,” the ex-SAS trooper said. “But she’s your baby till we hand her over to our Agency contact.”

      “No problem,” James answered.

      McCarter spoke into his throat mike. “Phoenix, we are leaving.”

      THE COMPOUND WAS DOTTED with fires. Corpses, broken weapons, body parts and the cinder hulks of destroyed vehicles specked the ground.

      Keeping their security level high, Phoenix Force approached a flat stretch of ground as Jack Grimaldi brought the Blackhawk in for a landing. From the opposite side of the clearing Able Team broke cover and began their approach to the helicopter.

      As the teams crammed into the troop transport bay under the watchful minigun, Carl Lyons looked over to where the girl sat quietly. James’s black fatigue shirt was hanging off her.

      “What the fuck?” Lyons demanded. “You can’t go anywhere without finding strays?”

      James laughed from behind his balaclava. “That’s why I signed up, man, to meet new people and make friends.”

      Lyons turned and looked at the carnage the Stony Man teams were leaving behind as the helicopter lifted off.

      “Oh, man.” The ex-cop chuckled. “We made plenty of friends today.”

      “Yeah,” McCarter agreed. “But we just don’t seem to play well with others.”

      Kiev, Ukraine

      KLEGG SIPPED HIS DRINK and watched the clubgoers through slitted eyes.

      The vodka was expensive and ice-cold so it went down with little more bite than frigid water. The dance beat, a hypno-industrial blend of tribal-styled rhythms, was two years past hip in New York and three in Europe. Despite this the meat-packing plant turned trendy nightclub was crowded with young, inebriated and apparently sexually frenzied young people fueled with chemical cocktails and copious amounts of hard alcohol.

      Next to him Svetlana scanned the crowd with the bored indifference of the nouveau riche. She was fashionably anorexic with thighs thinner than her knees and bare buds for breasts. She was draped in a Pierre Cardin silk number with all the ridiculously expensive space-age, unisex, avant-garde styling that implied. She let a hand drift to the flat plane of her stomach, her eyes as large as a character’s in a Japanese manga above the drawn, stark lines of her cheekbones.

      Klegg had known her for three days and in that time he’d never seen her eat anything but the olive from her vodka martini. Her energy, both in bed and out, seem entirely fueled by Stolichnaya Gold vodka and cocaine. She performed the most depraved of sexual acrobatics with the same robotic expression and untouchable eyes she used now to survey the club.