Splintered Sky. Don Pendleton

parachute flare. Through the holographic reflex sight, Lyons picked up a third rifleman who exposed only a small portion of his head and shoulders around the side of a big rock. The sight was a quick reaction design, and didn’t provide an increase of magnification, just a tiny, projected red dot in the middle of a glass screen that gave the big ex-cop a faster focus point. The projected red dot obscured the enemy shooter’s head and shoulders, and Lyons milked the trigger. At 650 rounds per minute, the carbine chewed out a blistering salvo of bullets that spat dirt and stone splinters up in a cloud.

      Another 40 mm grenade sizzled through the sky, and Lyons glanced back to Blancanales and Schwarz.

      The electronics genius had recovered his senses, but Blancanales had instinctively hooked his arm under Schwarz’s and yanked him along. Lyons bellowed, equalizing the pressure in his ears as he stuffed himself into the bottom of a gully beside the goat path.

      The darkened desert shook with a thunderbolt strike, and Lyons could feel his load-bearing vest ripple as the concussion burst swept across him. Blancanales’s grenade launcher burped again while Schwarz’s own DSA-58 carbine snarled a vengeful response. This time, the Puerto Rican Able Team veteran popped off an M379-A1 Airburst grenade. Instead of providing a miniature sun dangling from a parachute, the Airburst shell looped into an arc, landed on the ground and a black powder charge propelled the main grenade five feet into the air before its fuse wound down to detonation. At a height of five feet off the ground, the Airburst exploded, spraying out a sheet of lethal shrapnel that would kill anything within a sixteen-foot radius of the blast, but still could wound as far out as four hundred feet.

      A wailing scream of pain as shrapnel tore through body armor and fragile flash and bone beneath provided the testimony to its effectiveness. Lyons spotted the gunman who had dodged his initial burst, clutching his shredded face and neck. He’d lost his weapon when Blancanales’s shrapnel had scythed across him, and Lyons was about to put a few mercy rounds into the gunman when Schwarz nailed him.

      â€œCan you run?” Lyons asked over the headset.

      â€œYeah,” Schwarz replied. “The concussion wave only knocked the wind out of me.”

      â€œWe’ve lost the element of surprise.” Blancanales spoke up, pointing to the flare as it sputtered through the last of its forty-second lifespan, burning down to a lifeless ember that flopped under its parachute on the ground. “That baby was seen for miles.”

      â€œI saw their truck,” Lyons told him. “It did its job. Gadgets…”

      â€œI’ll get Jack on station,” Schwarz returned.

      The trio raced across the desert, wary that they might not have finished off all of their opponents.

      Charging up the goat path to the SUV took only another half minute. Lyons paused at roadside for a heartbeat to pop off a single round into a sprawled corpse to ensure it would never rise again. He noted with grim humor that Schwarz had been the one to nail the enemy gunman wielding the grenade launcher.

      The enemy’s SUV had a guard with a compact machine pistol. The man rushed to get back behind the wheel of his vehicle, firing across the hood, but Lyons and Blancanales stitched him with twin bursts of autofire. Blown nearly out of his boots, the guard’s corpse flopped in a boneless mass, door wide open.

      Blancanales checked the dead man and peeled the night-vision goggles off his face.

      â€œKeys are in the ignition,” Lyons announced, crawling into the SUV’s shotgun seat.

      â€œGood,” the Able Team commando replied. He slipped behind the wheel, fired up the engine and spun out.

      Schwarz was in the back, picking up the FLIR camera feed from Grimaldi’s helicopter, correlating the image with his GPS data. “They’re looping around, going for a second run at the border. They’re either certain their boys did the job, or they’re going to come in hot and heavy.”

      â€œI’m not going to wait to see what their response is,” Lyons said. He wedged his Mossberg shotgun into the seat well and rolled down the window, providing himself with room to shoot his carbine with its stock folded. “Nut up and do it.”

      â€œIt’s worked this long,” Schwarz agreed.

      Blancanales nodded. He could see the beacons on the enemy convoy blink out, their headlights flaring to life in an effort to blind him, but they were so far away, and the wily Able Team expert was so familiar with low-light operations, he avoided any discomfort. Turning his head to observe the cast-off infrared illumination instead of staring into the “invisible” light sources directly with his NVGs, he was able to keep his course to intercept the enemy trucks.

      Lyons had traded his carbine with Blancanales and stuffed an M-433 HEDP shell into its grenade launcher. The SUV jostled him, rocking hard in an effort to throw his aim off, but Lyons had earned the name Ironman due to his phenomenal strength. He’d braced himself in the passenger seat, pointed at a raider’s SUV and touched off the grenade. The high-explosive, dual-purpose shell spiraled toward the enemy vehicle at 350 feet per second, smashing into the grille of the onrushing Jeep. The M-433 exploded, a spit-back assembly built into the shell focusing a blistering-hot jet of molten copper, propelled by several ounces of A5 explosive through the engine block and into the cab of the SUV. The raiders’ driver and shotgun man were killed as the dashboard, speared by liquid metal and high explosives, turned to a mass of jagged, burning fragments that tore through their chests, legs and faces. Driverless, the enemy Jeep swerved into a rut and somersaulted in the air before it could bleed off speed. The men in the back seat, merely wounded by the cone of deadly shrapnel that used to be their ride, screamed for a moment before the airborne SUV slammed, roof-first into the Texas desert. The SUV had been designed to handle roll-overs, but no maker could have predicted their vehicle would be lifted up and hurled at the ground like a toy. The survivors’ screams cut off instantly as their bodies were compressed to ground beef under three-quarters of a ton of off-roading metal.

      The remaining three escorts for the big trucks swung out, gunners ripping off streams of autofire. Schwarz had targeted one of the Suburbans as they swung parallel to Able Team for a moment, his hammering carbine carving a bloody swathe through the open windows that the enemy gunners fired from. The vehicle that Schwarz raked swung wildly off course, a lifeless body flopping half in and out of the window he’d used as a turret. Schwarz, a veteran of countless gun battles inside of a vehicle, had known to tuck himself low, using the window-reinforced door as his shield, rather than expose his head and shoulders in an effort to utilize the opening as a turret.

      Blancanales swung the front of Able Team’s captured Suburban on an intercept course for a second of the raiders’ vehicles, giving the wheel a jerk at the last moment to stab the corner of the front fender into the rear wheel of the passing enemy. The fender deformed on Able Team’s ride, but the rear axle of the hostile Suburban snapped like a twig under the force of the SUV hammering into it. The mysterious marauders wailed in dismay as their truck spiraled through the desert, back wheels flying off.

      â€œLast one’s keeping its distance,” Lyons noted. “I’m only getting glancing shots on it. Their driver’s good.”

      â€œForget him for now,” Blancanales snapped. “We’ve got the main trucks to deal with.”

      Lyons glanced back at the pair of trucks. They were two-and-a-half-ton M35 trucks, and they were lumbering toward the goat path as fast as they could roll, taking advantage of the distraction provided by their escorts. The Able Team leader sneered and pushed home another M-433, then remembered the possibility that the marauders had taken captives.

      Rather than risk noncombatants, he pulled his Mossberg Cruiser 500. The Brenneke slug load would be devastating in close quarters, and not as risky