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Once he sensed the skirmish was over, McCarter warily stepped clear of the rocks he’d taken cover behind, his eyes on the carnage.
“Canvass the area for flare-ups,” he shouted to James and Encizo.
McCarter’s colleagues rose to their feet and began to cautiously make their way through the camp, motioning for the surviving Hezbollah warriors to group together near the veiled helicopter. The beleaguered recruits complied, some of them sobbing, others crying out in pain. McCarter, meanwhile, backtracked to the boulders where he’d left Hale. The CIA agent was slumped across the rocks, M-16 at his side. The Phoenix Force leader climbed up to him. Hale had lost his makeshift compresses and his initial wounds bled heavily onto the rocks. He’d taken two more slugs, as well, one to the shoulder, the other a clear killshot to the head. McCarter fingered the man’s wrist for a pulse, already knowing he wouldn’t find one.
“Damn it,” McCarter murmured.
There was nothing to be done for Hale. McCarter grimly braced himself, then hoisted the dead man off the rocks and slung him over his shoulder. He could feel Hale’s blood drenching him as he slowly hauled the body back to the camp. James and Encizo had finished rounding up the prisoners. There were ten of them. As McCarter went to join them near the helicopter, he detected movement through the smoke near where James’s grenade had earlier cratered the hardpan. A half-clad Hezbollah soldier was rising up from the tunnels, hands clasped to his head. Even as the man was stepping out onto the level ground, another recruit followed behind him, then yet another. Soon a total of seven young men had appeared, all unarmed, all hacking and blinking away tears from the gas that had left them defenseless. Finally Hawkins brought up the rear, still wearing his gas mask, still clutching his KRISS Super V subgun.
“Nice work, Teej,” McCarter told him, dropping to one knee so that he could ease Hale’s body to the ground.
“Thank the Gopher Snake,” Hawkins replied. “Little sucker worked like a charm.”
McCarter was bathed in sweat and blood. He rose slowly, his legs aching from the exertion of toting the corpse.
“What’s the situation down there?” he asked.
“There’s still a few men in the tunnels,” Hawkins reported. “Five dead, probably that many out cold, at least for now. Combs has ’em covered, but I’d best get back before they come to.”
McCarter nodded. “Did you spot anything besides barracks?”
“About what you’d expect,” Hawkins reported. “Command post, weapons cache, storage area. Plenty to search through.”
“Combs has his camera, so go ahead and let him take a few shots, but don’t spend any more time down there than you have to.”
“You want him to call for our chopper?”
“Hold off for now,” McCarter said, glancing at the net-shrouded Huey. “If we can get this sucker going, we won’t have to wait around.”
Hawkins nodded, leaving his prisoners in Encizo’s care and venturing back underground. McCarter turned to James as he approached the helicopter. “Help me get the net off.”
“Gonna hotwire it?” James asked as he grabbed one edge of the thick netting slung over the Huey’s rotors. He worked with one hand, keeping his M-16 trained on the prisoners with the other. McCarter was doing the same.
“If that’s what it takes,” the Briton said. “We’ll have room for Hale and a couple prisoners. Hopefully some of them speak English and will horsetrade info for some leniency.”
“What about the rest of them?” James asked.
“If it were us, they’d probably just gun us down and be done with it,” McCarter guessed. “Can’t see doing it, though. We’ll just leave ’em.”
James stared at the prisoners. They were all young, some in their teens. They looked back at him, some still fearful while others had turned sullen, their eyes filled with hate. It sickened James to think that these men would no doubt quickly regroup with others and resume their training, possibly even more determined than ever to turn themselves into killing machines for the Hezbollah cause. But he knew McCarter was right; they couldn’t in good conscience just massacre the whole lot of them. To do so would be to drag Phoenix Force down to the enemy’s level. It was bad enough that the Stony Man commandos had to regularly navigate their way through moral gray areas to carry out their assignments; if they were to succumb completely to the dark side, they would have betrayed not only their country, but also themselves. Still, the matter didn’t sit well with James.
“Gotta say,” he finally murmured, “giving them a free pass sucks, big time.”
“Tell me about it,” McCarter said. “Sometimes war is more than just hell.”
CHAPTER TEN
Leystra Hot Springs, California
Leystra Hot Springs was a once prominent New Age retreat located eighty miles east of Los Angeles in the heart of a heavily wooded forest blackened by the 2007 fires that had turned Southern California into hell on Earth. The twenty-one-acre retreat had fallen on hard times even before the fire, and when flames had ravaged most of the outbuildings and neighboring establishments, the facility’s owners had filed for bankruptcy and closed its doors. The grounds had been fenced off haphazardly with posted caveats against trespassing, but the low-bidding rent-a-cops hired to back up the warnings rarely so much as drove past the isolated property, much less searched it for intruders.
As such, the haven had become a retreat, not for the pampered and well-to-do, but rather a succession of downtrodden squatters, some hardbound transients, others former area residents left homeless in the wake of the fires. However, judging from the aerial surveillance that had prompted Able Team’s early morning arrival, it appeared that the hot springs’ latest uninvited guests were of a far more sinister nature.
Grimaldi and his Stony Man confederates weren’t the only ones targeting the isolated facility. The California Highway Patrol was in the process of barricading the access road in both directions, and SWAT teams had already spilled out of two armored Humvees and begun to venture into the dense brush surrounding the hot springs. To the north, another pair of helicopters—one a CHP H-20, the other a refurbished SWAT Huey—hovered low over the mountainous terrain that stretched behind the retreat. The heavy show of force was in response to word that more than one person had been seen on the grounds. Kouri Ahmet apparently wasn’t alone.
“Whatever happened to the good old days when we took care of these things ourselves?” Carl Lyons muttered as he eyeballed the backup forces. The Able Team commander was sitting beside Grimaldi up front in the Bell’s cockpit; Blancanales and Schwarz were in back, feeding ammo cartridges into their M-16s.
“Everybody’s gotta feel important, I guess,” Blancanales said.
Grimaldi eased the chopper over the leafy oak trees surrounding the retreat, then hovered in place above one of the hot springs. The pool had once been enclosed, but fire had claimed the surrounding structure, reducing it to charred ruins. Half submerged in the murky, steaming water was the missing Forest Service pickup. Floating facedown nearby amid scattered leaves and debris were two bodies, one stripped to its shorts, the other still uniformed.
“That’s gotta be the rangers,” Lyons said, peering down at the corpses. “Let’s see if we can’t give those poor bastards some justice.”
“Closest I can get is the parking lot,” Grimaldi said.
“Close enough.”
Grimaldi pulled away from the spring, then backtracked to a large, cracked patch of asphalt thirty yards downhill. As the pilot lowered the chopper, Lyons turned to his colleagues.
“You and I’ll handle the ground search,” he told Blancanales. “Gadgets, stay aboard and keep the fly open in case we need air support.”
“Got it,” Schwarz said, throwing open the side door of the passenger compartment. Blancanales eased past him. Once Grimaldi had brought the chopper to within a few feet of the tarmac, he bounded out. Lyons followed. Both men crouched low, fanned by the copter’s rotor wash as it pulled back up into the air.
Of the retreat’s eight buildings, only three remained standing. The nearest was a graffiti-festooned, garage-size bungalow set off a flagstone pathway linking the parking lot to the hot spring where the pickup had been spotted.
“I got this one,” Lyons told Blancanales. “You take the one over there. We’ll hit the main building last.”
Blancanales nodded and cautiously advanced toward a half-scorched two-story outbuilding with two large bay openings. A late-model Dodge Caravan had been backed into one bay; the other contained the rusted-out remains of a tractor and large riding lawn mower. The van had a layer of road dust but Blancanales could see that the windshield wipers had been used recently, likely by the al Qaeda sleeper cell Able Team had been trying to track down in Barstow. It now seemed certain that Kouri Ahmet’s aborted attempt to secure portable rocket launchers had been on behalf of the Iraqi terrorist squad. Obviously the fugitive’s parachute jump from the highjacked Gulfstream had been orchestrated to bring him within range of the Iraqis. The enemy had last been spotted in Barstow, but Blancanales’s gut told him that this was their primary hideout, the one from which they were planning whatever violence they hoped to unleash on Los Angeles. If Blancanales and his fellow commandos had anything to say about it, that plan would never be carried out.
Both large-framed picture windows on the second floor of the outbuilding had been vandalized, and Blancanales was startled when several pigeons suddenly fluttered out through a break in the glass. He doubted that it was his approach that had spooked the birds, and when he glanced up he detected further movement behind the broken glass. Acting on instinct, the East L.A. native veered sharply to his right, avoiding the stream of gunfire that rained down from one of the windows, tearing up the asphalt where he’d been standing a moment before.
“Got a live one over here!” Blancanales shouted to Lyons as he rolled behind an overturned litter barrel. Bringing his M-16 into play, he returned fire, shattering what little glass remained in the window frame and perforating the wooden slats below it. He’d missed his target, however, and more rounds blitzed his way, chewing the tarmac and glancing off the trash bin. When Lyons doubled back and fired at his assailant, Blancanales welcomed the diversion and rolled clear. Once back on his feet, he zigzagged toward the building. Nearing the bay where the Dodge was parked, he peered in and spotted a gunman bounding down a back stairway leading from the second story.
Blancanales drew up and strafed the staircase, taking the gunman out at the knees. The Iraqi pitched forward, dropping his rifle and somersaulting down the steps before landing in a sprawl near the Caravan. He was still alive and crawled toward his weapon, managing to close his fingers around the stock before Blancanales finished him off with another burst from his M-16.
There was at least one other al Qaeda operative still up on the second floor, however, and after forcing Lyons to cover with an autoburst, the gunner moved to the top of the stairs and shifted his aim toward Blancanales. By then the Able Team commando had reached the building and dived forward, eluding the blasts sent his way. Scrambling past the parked van, he helped himself to the slain attacker’s carbine, a Chinese-made QBZ-95. He took aim at the ceiling and quickly emptied the weapon. Above the loud din of gunfire, he heard the unmistakable sound of a body dropping to the floor above him.
Blancanales looked out through the bay opening and saw Grimaldi drifting toward him in the OH-58C. Schwarz was leaning out of the chopper, pouring more rounds into the second story. Blancanales waited out the assault, then waved to his colleague and gestured that he was heading up the steps. Schwarz nodded and pulled himself back inside the chopper. As Grimaldi flew over the building, Blancanales cast aside the QBZ and charged the steps, taking them two at a time, M-16 in firing position.
Clearing the last step, Blancanales saw the second assailant stretched out dead on the floor. He started toward the body, then flinched, hearing a noise behind him. A beam of sunlight glanced off the knife blade streaking toward him, and the next thing he knew, Blancanales felt the sharp edge rip through his shirt and glance off his ribs. The man holding the weapon had lunged at him, and when the two men collided, Blancanales was sent reeling backward. He grabbed his attacker and both men went tumbling down the staircase.
Blancanales took the brunt of the fall, cushioning the knifeman from the steps. By the time he reached the ground, the Stony Man commando’s wind had been knocked from his lungs. He lay, stunned, as the Iraqi rose to his knees, still clutching the now-bloodied knife. He was about to plunge the blade into Blancanales’s chest when a volley of 7.62 mm NATO rounds streaked into the service bay, eviscerating the terrorist’s midsection. The knife fell from the Iraqi’s hands as he pitched forward on top of his would-be victim.
Groaning, Blancanales shoved the man aside and gasped for breath, blinking away the stars that flashed across his field of vision. Lyons caught up with him a moment later.
“You okay?” he asked, helping his colleague to his feet.
Blancanales ripped his shirt open and inspected the bleeding gash along his rib cage. “Could’ve been worse,” he said. “Thanks for the backup.”
“No problem,” Lyons said, eyeing his teammate’s wound. “You’re going to need stitches on that sucker, though.”
“Later,” Blancanales said. He turned his attention to the two men lying dead next to them. Both looked to be in their late twenties, dark-haired and olive-skinned. Neither was Kouri Ahmet.
“Our sleeper cell guys?” Lyons said.
“Gotta be,” Blancanales said. He gestured at the Dodge Caravan. “The van matches the one that grease monkey saw up in Barstow.”
“I kinda like the irony of them driving around on American wheels.”
“They probably swiped it, same as Ahmet did that ranger’s truck.”
“Speaking of that scumbag,” Lyons said. “If we didn’t get him here, odds are he’s still out—”
The Able Team leader’s voice was drowned out by a fresh outbreak of gunfire. He and Blancanales glanced toward the bungalow Lyons had been headed for before the assault at the outbuilding. They could see another gunman standing in the open doorway of the smaller building, directing fire up at the OH-58C.
“The fun never stops,” Lyons said, slamming a fresh cartridge into his M-16.
“S WING AROUND !” Schwarz shouted at Grimaldi, bracing himself in the chopper’s open doorway.
“Gladly!” Grimaldi answered. The Stony Man pilot had just missed being hit by the slug that had punched through his side window. He dipped the chopper sharply, then brought it about-face so that Schwarz could see the gunman, who’d ducked for cover behind a flagstone wall extending out from the bungalow. Schwarz tattooed the wall, keeping the enemy pinned behind it. From the corner of his eye, he saw Lyons and Blancanales spread out so they could advance on the gunner from separate directions.
“Up a little higher,” Schwarz told Grimaldi. “Then ease in a little closer.”
Grimaldi urged the OH-58C up and forward, trying to bring the shooter back into view. As he did so, rounds from yet another gunman began to pepper the chopper’s underside. Grimaldi turned to his right and saw the enemy leaning out from a large, wisteria-choked pergola behind the bungalow.
“Three o’clock!” he shouted.
“Got him!”
Schwarz shifted position and leveled his M-16, firing before the assailant could retreat behind one of the pergola’s wooden colonnades. The rounds found flesh and the gunner keeled to the ground, his upper torso freshly embroidered.
The first shooter, emboldened by Schwarz’s distraction, rose from behind the flagstone wall and sent a fusillade whizzing through the chopper doorway before Gadgets whirled back around and nailed him.
By now Lyons and Blancanales had reached the bungalow. Grimaldi left them to raid the interior and pulled away, guiding the chopper above a meandering walkway that led back to the remaining building, a larger, one-story cinder-block orientation center with a sun-faded sign out front that still beckoned visitors with an inviting come-on: Our Spring’s Just the Thing!
The first of the SWAT ground units had begun to materialize from out of the vegetation surrounding the orientation center. Wearing flak jackets over their camo fatigues, they spread out, encircling the building. From Grimaldi’s aerial perspective, he could see that the main entrance was still boarded up, but a side door was ajar. As he watched, two of the SWAT officers approached the entryway, one brandishing a MAC-10, the other a semiautomatic Benelli M-1 shotgun. They were within ten yards of the door when it suddenly flew open. A short, wiry man dived out headfirst, rolling on impact with the ground and scrambling quickly to his feet, a 9 mm Heckler & Koch MP-5 cradled close to his chest. He managed to fire a killshot into the face of the SWAT shotgunner before being brought down by the other commando’s MAC-10.
As the rest of the SWAT team converged on every available opening to the O-building, Grimaldi brought the chopper up higher in the hope of gaining a vantage point from which Schwarz could effectively lend fire from the air. The maneuver was a fortuitous one.
Seconds later, with a deafening roar, a series of explosive charges detonated inside the building, blowing its cinder-block walls outward and turning the roof into a frag shower that hailed upwards, pelting the OC-58’s skids and underbelly. Had Grimaldi not just changed his position, the flying shrapnel would have likely sheared his rotors, bringing the bird down. As it was, the flyboy was hard-pressed to keep the chopper aloft when the blast’s shock wave tossed the craft about.
The jolt caught Schwarz off guard and threw him out the Bell’s open doorway, M-16 flying from his grasp. If not for his martial arts training, the Stony Man warrior would likely have plummeted sixty feet to certain death on the flagstone walkway below. Instead, with nimble instincts, Schwarz was able to throw out his right arm and break his fall by grabbing the chopper’s right skid. His fingers clamped tightly around the cold metal, buying him the time needed to raise his other arm and secure a firmer grip.
“Still here!” he shouted through clenched teeth.
Grimaldi couldn’t hear Schwarz over the rotors and the din of the explosion, but when the displaced weight pitched the chopper to one side he realized Schwarz was still aboard and quickly compensated, righting the aircraft and then slowly bringing it down.
Lyons and Blancanales had been knocked to the ground by the blast, but by the time the OH-58C had dipped to within ten yards of the pathway, both men were on their feet. They scrambled over and grabbed Schwarz’s dangling legs, allowing him to let go of the chopper’s skid. As they eased him down to solid ground, the helicopter floated off, bound for the parking lot where the whole ordeal had begun.
“Nice stunt,” Lyons told Schwarz. “You had us going there for a minute.”
“Tell me about it,” Schwarz said, flexing the life back into his numbed fingers. “Don’t try this at home, kids.”
The team’s levity was short-lived, giving way to a grim silence as they made their way to the debris-filled crater that had once been the orientation center. The blackened, smoldering hellhole was nearly twenty feet deep, flames consuming any trace of the explosives that had created it. Lying on the perimeter like tossed dolls were the members of the SWAT team, most of them dismembered by shrapnel, none of them breathing.
“What the hell did they have stored in there, World War III?” Lyons wondered, gazing past the bodies into the crater.
The blast had caught the attention of the rest of the backup teams, and by the time Grimaldi joined his colleagues, the other two choppers were headed toward them. Sirens wailed to life out on the road as a pair of CHP Crown Victorias pulled out of their barricade positions and raced toward the parking lot along with one of the SWAT Hummers.
“They’re a little late,” Schwarz said.
Blancanales had ventured over to the enemy gunman who’d dived from the building shortly before the explosion. He turned the body over, then looked at his partners.
“It’s not Ahmet,” he reported.
Lyons glanced at the crater and shook his head. “If he’s in there, it’s gonna take more than dental charts to ID him.”
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