Promise To Defend. Don Pendleton

the watch. Another sixty seconds and things would get very interesting indeed.

      Grabbing his crossbow, he remained in a crouch, but moved to the alley’s mouth. The stifling heat barely registered with him. He was accustomed to such temperatures and, in fact, found them more comfortable than the cool evenings that sometimes prevailed in Virginia at Stony Man Farm.

      He returned his attention to the problem at hand. Peering around the edge of the building, he stared at the embassy grounds and saw a pair of men, each carrying an AK-47, walking the grounds.

      He felt a new rush of anger as he watched them swagger through the compound, faces obscured by scarves. They walked in the open, apparently unafraid, while they held innocent people inside, terrorizing them and the free world as they held the hostages.

      Calvin James’s voice sounded in his earpiece.

      “Rafe?”

      “Go.”

      “I’m in position. You?”

      “Affirmative.”

      “Fifteen seconds until they cut the power.”

      “Then it all goes by the numbers, my friend.”

      “Swift and silent.”

      “Damn straight.”

      The radio went silent. Encizo waited another moment until streetlights and the large halogen spotlights illuminating the embassy winked out, plunging the compound into darkness. When they did, he slid his NVGs down over his eyes, crept out from the alley and darted for the embassy grounds.

       In less than a minute he came to rest a few yards from the fence, his approach obscured by the hip-high concrete walls used to stop truck and car bombers from hurtling into the compound. Chancing a look over the barrier, he peered through the gate and spotted a pair of terrorists separating from each other and sweeping the muzzles of their assault rifles over the horizon as they evaluated the power outage. Rising from behind the barrier only as much as necessary, Encizo locked the crossbow’s sights on the nearer terrorist and triggered the weapon. The shaft drilled into the man’s throat. Gurgling, stumbling backward, the man’s weapon fell from his hands as he grabbed for the bolt protruding from his throat. A moment later life left his body and he folded in on himself.

      Staying low, Encizo turned at the waist and loaded another bolt. Upon seeing his comrade suddenly pitch to the ground, the other terrorist dropped to a crouch and fanned his AK-47 over the horizon, his free hand scrambling for a cellular telephone. Encizo triggered the crossbow. An instant later the terrorist froze as a bolt jutted from his ribs, the razor-sharp tip tearing through his heart. Even as his corpse pitched toward the ground, power returned to the embassy compound, probably thanks to the emergency generators. External lights kicked back on, flooding the grounds with white as lights winked back on inside the main building.

      Encizo checked his watch: 9:07 p.m.

      Right on time.

      “Two down, Cal,” he whispered into his throat mike. “Status?”

      A moment passed without reply. Another second—this one more agonized—came and went, too.

      “Cal? Cal?” Encizo whispered again, this time more urgently. All that filled the silence was the plummeting sensation in his stomach. Before he could utter another word, gunshots rang out from within the compound.

      CHAPTER FOUR

      San Diego, California

      Carl Lyons checked the load in his .357 Colt Python, then returned the revolver to shoulder leather. Scowling, he stared at the nondescript building across the street from him and watched for the black Mercedes coupe he hoped would come soon. He leaned his left shoulder against the exterior wall of a convenience store and checked his watch for the fourth time in three minutes.

      “You think that son of a bitch knows?” he growled into his throat mike.

      “Negative,” Blancanales replied. “You’re just getting impatient.”

      “Damn straight I am,” Lyons said. “We’ve been waiting for forty-five minutes and the guy still hasn’t shown. He’s the best link we’ve got at this point.”

      “Hang loose, hombre. He’ll be along.”

      “Maybe he knows that we’re looking for him.”

      “You think Hal called and tipped him off?”

      “All right. Point taken.”

      “Relax,” Blancanales said. “He’ll be along any minute.”

      They’d come looking for Abda Hakim, a Saudi Arabian who, according to classified reports from the Treasury Department, raised money for Arm of God and funneled it back to the group’s overseas operations. The current site housed a fairly sophisticated money-laundering system that tapped into dozens of overseas banks. In addition, it backed into a warehouse containing stacks of counterfeit CDs, DVDs, software and video games shipped from overseas and sold in the United States.

      A fairly sophisticated operation, Lyons grudgingly admitted. For a hairball. Having lost the terrorists’ trail at the border, Able Team had decided that Hakim made the best point of contact for the killers once they moved into the country.

      That put him at the top of Able Team’s list.

      Increasingly impatient, Lyons returned to his full height and brushed the brick dust from his shoulder.

      As he did, three young men dressed in gang colors swaggered past, eyes boring into him, unsuccessfully trying to intimidate him. Lyons, his mouth a hard line, his eyes hidden by mirrored sunglasses, held their stares behind the shades and let his scowl deepen. The stakes of the mission in front of him and the other members of Able Team were high, and he was in no mood to indulge in a contest of wills with a pack of gang bangers. The first two either lost interest or sensed they were outclassed; the third let his hard stare linger, apparently waiting for the moment when the former L.A. cop would back down. It didn’t happen.

      As the final gang banger walked on, Lyons noticed a tremor pass through the guy. He allowed himself a tight grin.

      Blancanales’s voice came over his earpiece. “Ironman, you still got it.”

      “Bet your ass I do.”

      Schwarz, who was watching the rear of the target building from a nearby rooftop, broke in. “Look alive. We’ve got Hakim’s Beemer pulling in.”

      “Roger that,” Lyons said. “He have help?”

      “Right. Two, no, three hard-looking guys. Probably bodyguards.”

      “Probably,” Lyons said. “Or walking corpses. Depends on how they want to play it. Let’s move.”

      Lyons crossed the parking lot and waded into traffic. Irritated drivers honking their horns and shouting obscenities barely registered with him as he crossed the street. From his peripheral vision, he saw Blancanales exit a surveillance van disguised as a bakery truck and approach the office building from the right.

      The men met at the building’s entrance, a pair of glass doors. Lyons slid his hand inside his jacket. His fingers encircled the Colt’s grip, but he left it in its holster. Driving a shoulder into the door, Lyons entered the lobby with Blancanales a step behind him. Moving in lockstep, they strode across the room. A pair of heavies, one dressed in a suit, the other in jeans and a T-shirt, lounged at what Lyons guessed was a guard station, a steel desk topped by a telephone and a sign-in sheet attached to a clipboard.

      The bigger of the two men, the casually dressed guy, rounded the desk, his face a hard mask of anger. His exposed arms a mosaic of ropelike muscles, veins and stretch marks, he stepped between Lyons and the elevator.

      Snapping off his shades, Lyons stepped to within a hair-breadth of the guy and locked eyes with the bigger man. The guard stank of perfumed hair gel and apparently