High Assault. Don Pendleton

hear the Iranian cell leader again.

      “—let the American commandos come. We’ll have a surprise waiting for them.”

      Then Ayub looked down at the cored-out head and blown-apart face of his victim and began to laugh. Immediately the knot of Shiite terrorists around Anjali started laughing, too.

      Screw it, he thought and chuckled right along.

      Caracas, Venezuela

      ARAS KASIM could hardly believe his good fortune. For five years he had labored in Tehran watching dissidents and walking point on guard teams for important Imams, opening limo doors and shoving people clear on the streets. The whole experience had been an exercise in extreme boredom and hardly the reason he had left a Revolutionary Guard marine battalion combat swimmer assignment for a position with VEVAK.

      Then he had worked a security detail under a colonel named Ayub and his life had changed almost overnight. Ayub had his pick of intelligence ministry agents, and from within the protective umbrella of Brigadier General Najafi’s patronage the colonel got what he wanted when he wanted it. Kasim had earned his stripes in this new operation first by smuggling explosive devices across the southwestern Iranian border into Iraq and then to Baghdad.

      Once he had proved himself resourceful and battle tested, Ayub had used him as a insurgent-cell communications facilitator and, finally, as a punitive agent against anyone suspected of disloyalty within the organization. Kasim had executed seven Iraqi insurgents and tortured three times as many under Ayub’s direction.

      With his competence established Ayub had begun to tap him for more and more serious activities. First travel to the border areas of Pakistan to coordinate with al Qaeda and Taliban operatives there. Then to carry money to cells in Lebanon and the Philippines. There was the torture and murder of a CIA case officer in Ethiopia followed by the meetings with Russian arms dealers in Chechnya.

      And finally there was the Juan Escondito network.

      The Venezuelan narco-trafficante had been a secular blessing to the Iranian intelligence operative. Meetings included fine whiskey, the kindest cuts of cocaine and more young prostitutes than Kasim could ever have prayed existed.

      In bed with two of them now, Kasim could only look up toward heaven past the spinning ceiling fan and offer thanks for what the teenage girls were doing to him now. He leaned back against the cool spread of his sheets with their three-hundred-count weave of Egyptian cotton. His body was slick with sweat and the smell of sex was a heavy musk in the room.

      On the table was a half-empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label and a mirror piled high with fine-quality cocaine. His head was buzzing and his skin tingled with euphoric sensations. He could feel the press of Marta’s breasts against his shin bone on one side and hot damp cling of Juanita’s sex on the arch of his other foot as they took turns pleasing him. They would growl and chatter in Spanish to each other and he just knew, though he didn’t speak a word, that they were just saying the filthiest of things.

      In the morning Program Manticore would begin the operation to bring jihad into the American heartland. Lethal justice would spread through the United States like drugs from the Southern Hemisphere, and the warmongering westerners would relearn what terror really was.

      He reached down and put a possessive hand on the top of Marta’s bobbing head. Once this was over he would see about parlaying his service into a permanent assignment in South America. The Israelis had a presence here, as well, and the only thing that could please Kasim more than operating against the Americans would be a chance to kill Jewish agents of the Satan state.

      He felt Juanita’s fingers begin to massage his testicles then slide lower; she knew what he liked best of all. All in all Kasim could not think of a more perfect outcome for his life.

      ABLE TEAM’S PLAN was simple.

      They would come in on a commercial flight and make it through customs clean. Following that they would pick up a vehicle and make their way to a safehouse used by the CIA and Army special operations. There, Able Team would establish a base before starting surveillance of the target.

      Things began to go wrong immediately.

      Carl Lyons pulled his carry-on bag down from the overhead compartment just after the unfasten seat belts sign popped up on the TWA commercial flight. They were flying first-class as part of their administrative cover and the team leader had watched, bemused, as Rosario “Politician” Blancanales worked his gregarious charm on a Hispanic flight attendant.

      Team funny man Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz had cracked one stale joke after another as the silver-haired smooth talker flirted shamelessly with the dark-eyed Venezuelan beauty half his age.

      There wasn’t a person on the plane among the crew or passengers who didn’t think the three men were anything but what they claimed; middle-aged divorced tourists on a South American vacation. Blancanales’s audacity was role-playing brilliance.

      If there was anything bothering Lyons as he exited the plane after the flight attendant had slipped her cell number to Blancanales, it was that circumstances dictated they begin the operation unarmed. Carl Lyons didn’t like taking a shower unarmed, let alone entering a potentially volatile nation without a weapon.

      “Okay,” Schwarz murmured as they emerged into the big, air-conditioned terminal, “we can add a certain TWA flight attendant named Bonita to our roster of Stony Man local assets.”

      “Oh, yeah,” Lyons replied, “I’m sure she’ll be a big help. We can just send Dave and his boys down here sometime and they can all crash at her hacienda. It’ll be like the Farm ‘South.’”

      “You see how it is, Gadgets?” Blancanales said, voice weary. “You try to take one for the team and management doesn’t appreciate it. I try to show loyalty through service and all I get is cynical pessimism.”

      “Can you gentlemen come this way.”

      The voice interrupted their banter with a tone of un-disputed authority. The members of Able Team turned their heads as one to take in the speaker. He was a tall Latino with jet-black hair, mustache and eyes in the crisp uniform of a Venezuelan customs officer. There was a 9 mm automatic pistol in a polished holster on his hip, but the flap was closed and secured.

      However a few paces behind him the assault rifles of the military security guards were visible as the soldiers stood with hands on pistol grips and fingers resting near triggers.

      Lyons scowled. Schwarz gave the officer his best grin in reply to the summons. Then he turned his head slightly and whispered out of the side of his mouth, “Any chance you want to take one for the team now, Pol?”

      Blancanales fixed an insincere grin of his own on his face. “Nope. This time we move right to cynical pessimism,” he replied.

      VENEZUELAN CUSTOMS separated the three men quickly, hustling them into separate rooms. There they sat isolated for two hours. Carl Lyons found himself sitting in front of a plain metal table on an uncomfortable folding chair while the customs officer pretended to read official-looking papers printed in Spanish with a government seal at the top of the pages.

      Fluent in Spanish, Lyons easily read them and saw they were merely quarterly flight-maintenance reports being used as props. Warily, Lyons decided to relax a bit; this seemed a more random occurrence than he had first feared. The Farm had considerable resources, but the operation was miniscule compared to other government agencies, and Stony Man operatives were often forced to rely on logistical support from larger bureaucratic entities. Whenever that happened security became a prime concern, but for now this seemed a more typical customs roust than anything more threatening.

      The officer, whose name tag read Hernandez, picked up Lyons’s passport and opened it. “Mr. Johnson?” His English was accented but clipped and neat.

      Lyons nodded. “That’s me.”

      Hernandez regarded him over the top of the little blue folder. “What brings you to Venezuela?”

      “Sunny weather,