Splintered Sky. Don Pendleton

Moments after the doors deformed, they toppled over, concussive force shearing them from their moorings. Inside, a Cessna Stationaire idled, its propeller sucking smoke from the detonations into spirals of inky grayness. The dark-clad, blond figure stood in a half-open door and brought up a pair of flashing Uzi submachine guns.

      Lyons and Blancanales dived for cover as a salvo of 9 mm slugs stabbed at them. The Able Team leader grunted as his body armor stopped a pair of slugs, and he triggered the Colt Python, knowing it wouldn’t be enough to stop the prop plane. He missed the twin-machine-pistol-wielding enemy leader as the Cessna shot forward. Another plane closed its access door and followed the lead plane, but having started later, it was slower, enabling Blancanales to cut loose with his FAL rifle.

      The engine belched smoke as 7.62 mm slugs tore into it. The high-velocity bullets shattered the pistons, freezing up the propeller. Lyons let the Python drop to the tarmac and he unslung his Mossberg 500. Tromboning the slide, he hammered a blast of slugs into the fuselage and passenger cabin. Twelve-gauge missiles punched through fiberglass and flesh, tearing into the gunmen jammed into the back of the plane.

      Blancanales’s grenade launcher chugged loudly, a third Cessna disappearing in a cloud of flame and splinters.

      All the while, Lyons watched the lead plane, and the enemy commander, the same slender figure who’d raced into the darkness before. The Cessna climbed until it was a tiny speck in thousands of miles of empty sky. It was out of eyesight in a minute, but it was not out of sight of the satellites that the Farm had watching the airstrip.

      “That’s twice you’ve gotten away,” Lyons snarled. “But we’ll see where you’re going. There won’t be a third time.”

       CHAPTER FIVE

       The Pacific, en route to Thailand

      As they were making their preparations for the penetration into China, there were a few things on Phoenix Force’s side.

      The first was the requirement that orbital launch stations be as close to the equator as possible, which limited the facility to being on the southern coast of the nation, far closer to the equator than even NASA’s launch center in Cape Canaveral. While Florida was below the 25th Parallel, the south China coast was well below the 20th Parallel, the Tropic of Cancer. The nearness to the equator added to the facility of getting to orbital velocity by using the Earth’s rotation for help. Since space vehicles orbited simply by missing the Earth’s surface and atmosphere in their million-mile “fall,” it required less energy to attain the altitude necessary to enable that skillful task of throwing themselves at the ground and missing.

      Considering the nature of Stony Man Farm’s previous conflicts with the Chinese government in their sponsorship of terrorism and espionage against the United States, Phoenix Force and the Farm had developed dozens of infiltration protocols to get into the nation, contingencies that had been set up for other enemy nations that sponsored the atrocities McCarter and his men spent their lives fighting against. Actually using one of those contingency plans wasn’t something that McCarter relished, but there was the chance that this operation might be coming to the Chinese government’s rescue.

      McCarter mused on that for a moment as he reassembled his CZ P.01 pistol. A modern update of his favored Browning Hi-Power, with its safety replaced by an easy-to-reach decocking lever, it had the same ergonomics and high capacity as his preferred Browning, but its Czech origin meant it wouldn’t be traced back to the U.S. if it was lost in the heat of battle. He’d field-stripped the gun to ensure the mechanism was sound, with no burrs on any springs or bearing surfaces that could have compromised reliability. He loaded a 13-round magazine into the butt of the gun, racked the slide, thumbed down the decocker and holstered it. The P.01s were Czech police issue, but used 9 mm ammunition available around the world, including China. The same went for Phoenix Force’s Type 95 assault rifles. The compact bullpups were ugly, and oddly balanced, but they were tough, reliable and used Chinese military ammunition, the 5.8 mm cartridge easily garnered from enemy forces. His and Calvin James’s rifles were fitted with 35 mm under-barrel grenade launchers, while Gary Manning eschewed the compact bullpup for the NORINCO Type 79 self-loading sniper rifle. The Phoenix Force marksman preferred having a long-range weapon, and the 7.62 mm round had an effective range of 1300 meters.

      There would be no disguising their appearance, so the team was decked out with a variant of the Land Warrior combat suit. Stony Man Farm had helped them out with the camouflage pattern that would match the area they were inserting into. The Land Warrior suits were complex weaves of Kevlar and Nomex that T. J. Hawkins and Gary Manning were currently stenciling camou patterns onto. The rifles were being color detailed with camouflage paint by Rafael Encizo while Calvin James went over his medical kit to ensure that they were ready for whatever infections and injuries they could incur. Radiation poison inoculations were also being set up, given the chance of external exposure to lethal Iridium-132. The dense, radioactive metal could cause gamma radiation burns and poisoning.

      A layer of charcoal filtering underneath the Land Warrior suits would provide some protection, but gamma radiation was of a powerful, high-frequency energy wave that required high-density materials, such as lead aprons, to stop it. Unfortunately, that kind of protective covering would prove too bulky to wear into a stealth operation, and would hinder movement to such a degree that a firefight would leave them as practically stationary targets.

      McCarter’s satellite phone warbled and he picked it up. “News?”

      “We’ve been digging into SAD internal communiqués. We ended up with a few discarded, zero-filed memos in their trash,” Barbara Price announced. “Someone’s keeping information in SAD from getting out about anomalies in their military launch programs. The higher-ups are not getting discrepancies in field reports on their threat matrix because someone’s deleting them.”

      “I knew it didn’t make sense for the Chinese to try something big against the International Space Station,” McCarter said. “It’s too risky a move that could start a nuclear exchange.”

      “Renegade factions inside Chinese intel?” Price mused. “Or someone who tapped into them?”

      “We’ll have a chinwag with the blokes running the joint when we drop in, Barb,” McCarter returned.

      “We’ll keep tracing SAD communications to see if there’s evidence of a larger conspiracy within the government,” Price said. “So far, the way they’re smoke stacking the information, it looks like it might just be a small cadre involved, probably reinforced by international support.”

      A beep sounded, distracting Price. She put McCarter on hold for a few moments.

      “We’ve got confirmation of activity in Mexico,” Price broke in. “Able encountered a group of enemy soldiers in Sonora, utilizing an airstrip. They reinforced it with antiaircraft machine guns and a full squadron of aircraft on hand.”

      “Any escapes?” McCarter asked.

      “Carl has confirmed that the same one who got away from them at the border was at the strip. He took off under a wave of suppression fire, but he was the only one who did,” Price said. “We’ve got satellites tracking their plane.”

      McCarter rubbed his chin. “Then he won’t get away.”

      “You sound doubtful,” Price noted.

      McCarter looked at the satellite photographs of the Phoenix Graveyard launch facility. “They obviously have to know that their activities are being watched by us. We’ve got enough eyes in the sky—”

      “Image failure,” Price interrupted. “Bear’s reporting that we’ve lost satellite imaging on your insertion point.”

      “Looks like the Chinese have found their own copy of the antisatellite laser that Striker took out a while ago,” McCarter commented. “It’s no surprise that the Chinese ‘borrow’ technology from the Russians, whether Moscow wants them to or not.”

      “Damn it!” Price exclaimed. “Bear, we need to get on the horn to NRO now. Shift orbits for their birds over