Target Acquisition. Don Pendleton

      From outside of the building the militia of the faithful held the Iraqi National Army bootlickers and their American allies at bay. The troops around the man now were those returning from the line to grab a meal and resupply. Despite their exhaustion and wounds the Shiite extremists remained upbeat—happy with their performance.

      Then a vengeful god rained fire from the sky.

      Abu Hafiza jumped out of his chair at the sound of the explosion. Around him his men scrambled to respond and he looked across the table to the Iraqi police officer Saheed el-Jaga.

      “It’s them!” he hissed, stunned.

      “Ridiculous. They never could have gotten close. It must be an air strike. I told you to leave the city,” Saheed el-Jaga snapped back.

      Abu Hafiza thought about Ziad Jarrah sitting in Dubai like a spider at the center of his web. He thought of telling the crown prince how he had failed, how the Americans had driven him from the Shia stronghold in Baghdad.

      “No,” the Shiite terrorist said simply. “I’m safer here.”

      “I’m not!”

      Then they heard the gunfire burning out around them and they knew it was more than an air strike. They knew then that against all odds the unknown commandos had made it into the Shiite slum, had come for them. They both realized that whoever these clandestine operators were they would never give up.

      Instantly they rose up and ran to rally their men.

      “Fall in around me!” Saheed el-Jaga snarled.

      “To the roof and perimeter!” Abu Hafiza said in turn.

      Men were scrambling into positions and snatching up weapons.

      THE LINE DIPPED under Manning’s weight as he rode the Flying Fox cable car down the Kevlar zip-line. He sailed down the six stories and applied the hand brake at the last possible moment. He pivoted his feet up and struck the roof of the building on the soles of his combat boots.

      Because of the size of his primary weapon, the cut-down M-60E, he couldn’t roll with the impact and instead bled off his momentum by sliding across the roof like a batter stealing second. With the last of his forward energy the big Canadian sat up and took a knee, swinging his machine gun into position and clicking off the safety.

      Behind him he heard the sound as Calvin James hit the roof and rolled across one shoulder to come up with SPAS-15 ready. Above them they heard the muffled snaps as Hawkins cut loose with the silenced Mk 11 from his overwatch position. Below them in the courtyard around the sprawling house they heard men scream as the 7.62 mm rounds struck them.

      Covering the exposed roof, Manning turned in a wide arc as Rafael Encizo slid down to the roof, putting his feet down and his shoulder against the line to arrest his forward motion. The Cuban combat swimmer came off his Flying Fox and tore his Hawk MM-1 from where it rested against the front of his torso.

      McCarter landed right behind Encizo and rushed across the roof, M-4/M-203 up and in his hand. Gunfire burst out of a window in a mosque across the road. Manning shifted and triggered a burst of harassment fire from the hip. His rounds arced out across the space and slammed into the building, cracking the wall and shattering the lattice of a window. Red tracer fire skipped off the roof and bounced deeper into the city.

      Above the heads of Phoenix Force in their black rubber protective masks, T. J. Hawkins shifted the muzzle of his weapon on its bipod and engaged the sniper. He touched a dial on his scope and the shooter suddenly appeared in the crosshairs of the reticule on his optics.

      The man had popped up again after Manning’s burst had tapered off and was attempting to bring a 4-power scope on top of an M-16 A2 to bear on the exposed Americans.

      Hawkins found the trigger slack and took it up. He let his breath escape through his nose as he centered the crosshairs on the sniper’s eyes. For a brief strange second, it was as if the two men stared into each other’s eyes. The Iraqi pressed his face into the eyepiece on the assault rifle. The man shifted the barrel as he tried for a shot.

      The silenced Mk 11 rocked back against Hawkins’s shoulder. The smoking 7.62 mm shell tumbled out of the ejection port and bounced across the tarpaper-and-gravel roof. In the image of his scope the Iraqi sniper’s left eye became a bloody cavity. The man’s head jerked and a bloody mist appeared behind him as he sagged and fell.

      Autofire began hammering the side of the building below Hawkins’s position. He rolled over on his back, snatching up his sniper rifle. He scrambled up, staying low, and crawled through the doorway of the roof access stair. He intended to shift positions and engage from one of the windows overlooking the compound in the building’s top floor.

      Below his position McCarter found what he was looking for. He pulled up short and shoved a stiffened forefinger downward, pointing at an enclosed glass skylight that served to open up and illuminate the breakfast area. The opening had appeared as a black rectangle on the images downloaded from the Farm’s Keyhole satellite, and from the first McCarter had seized on the architectural luxury as his means of ingress.

      “We have control,” Manning barked, and from half a world away Barbara Price and the Farm’s cyberteam watched from the UAV’s cameras. “We have control,” McCarter repeated.

      To create a distraction on the hard entry Gary Manning had prepared explosive charges. Being unable to precisely locate their target before the strike, nonlethal measures had been implemented. Working with Stony Man armorer John “Cowboy” Kissinger, the Canadian demolitions expert had prepped a series of flash-bang charges using stun grenades designed to incapacitate enemy combatants in airplane hangars, factories or warehouses. In addition to the massive SWAT noise-distraction device Manning and Kissinger had layered in several devices from ALS Technologies that contained additional payloads of CS gas.

      McCarter slipped into his own SAS model protective mask, then gave Calvin James a thumbs-up signal. “Five, four, three, two, one.”

      The ex-SEAL jogged forward and pointed the SPAS-15 at the skylight. The semiautomatic shotgun boomed and eight .38-caliber slugs smashed through the reinforced commercial-grade window.

      “Execute, execute, execute!” McCarter ordered.

      Instantly, Manning stepped up and threw his satchel charge into the hole. As it plunged through the opening, the entry team turned their backs from the breach, shielding their eyes and ears. Instantly the booming explosion came. Smoke poured out of the opening like the chimney of a volcano.

      James spun and stepped up to the ledge before dropping through the hole. He struck the ground and rolled to his left out along the side of his body, absorbing the impact from the ten-foot fall. He came up, the SPAS-15 tracking for a target in the smoke and confusion.

      A running body slammed into him, sending them both spinning. Ignoring the combat shotgun on its sling, James reached out with his left hand and tore the AKM from the figure’s grip, tossing it aside as he rolled to his feet. His Beretta appeared in his fist. He pulled the guy closer but didn’t recognize the stunned terrorist and put two 9 mm bullets through his slack-jawed face.

      David McCarter dropped down through the breach into chaos.

      He saw James drop a body and spin, his pistol up. Around him the whitish clouds of CS gas hung in patches but the interior space was large enough that the dispersal allowed line-of-sight identification.

      The Briton was violently thrown into a momentary flashback to his experience in the assault on London’s Iranian embassy after Arab separatists had taken it hostage. He saw a coughing, blinded gunman in an Iraqi police uniform stumble by and shot him at point-blank range with the M-4.

      The man was thrown down like a trip-hammered steer in a Chicago stockyard. McCarter went back down to a knee and twisted in a tight circle, muzzle tracking for targets. Behind him a third body dropped like a stone through the skylight breach.

      Rafael Encizo landed flat-footed then dropped to a single knee, his fireplug frame absorbing the stress of the