JAMES WASN’T LEAVING T.J. BEHIND

No matter what.

“I need a lead, Mack,” Calvin James stated. “Hal gave me the runaround. French security moved T.J., and we’re no longer trying to figure out where he is. The hit team that came after me was stripped clean. I’ve got no clues, no bread crumbs to follow.”

Bolan sighed. Every man who had signed up for Stony Man duty, including himself—especially himself—had understood that it could come to this.

Everyone had gone into the offered deal with his eyes wide open. Every man on Phoenix Force and Able Team had agreed, and now that the mission had gone south, that the worst-case scenario had finally occurred, Calvin James didn’t want to play by the rules anymore.

Bolan frowned. He wasn’t much on rules himself.

The Executioner picked up the phone.

Shadow War
Don Pendleton
Stony Man®

AMERICA’S ULTRA-COVERT INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Special thanks and acknowledgment to

Nathan Meyer for his contribution to this work.

SHADOW WAR

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

PROLOGUE

Barbara Price opened her eyes.

She awoke clearheaded and alert, knowing exactly where she was and what she needed to do. There was a war being fought in the shadows and like the ringmaster of a circus, she was at its epicenter. Her eyes went to the window of her bedroom. It was dark outside. She looked at the clock on her bedside table and saw she had been asleep for exactly forty-five minutes.

Price sat up and pushed a slender hand through her honey-blond hair. She felt revitalized after her power nap, and with a single cup of Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman’s coffee she knew she’d be ready to roll.

She got up out of the bed, smoothed her clothes and picked up the copy of the Washington Post she had placed on her table before stepping into the upstairs hallway of Stony Man Farm’s main house. The headline screamed out at her.

Colombian Businessman Busy Senator

Marcos Sincanaros, renowned currency speculator, has been tied to campaign contributions exceeding five million dollars to Maryland Senator…

Disgusted, Price stopped reading. She had too much on her mind at the moment to worry about Washington politics. She frowned. The name “Sincanaros” was familiar, however. She resolved to ask Akira Tokaido, one of the Farm’s computer wizards, to see if Stony Man had a file on the man.

As Price walked down the hall, she began clicking through options and mentally categorizing her tasks. She had men in the field, preparing to step into harm’s way, and it was her responsibility to coordinate all the disparate parts into a seamless whole.

The Farm’s mission controller was headed to the basement when the cell phone on her belt began to vibrate. She plucked it free and used the red push-talk button.

“Price, here,” she said coolly.

“Barb,” Carmen Delahunt began, “the teams are in jump-off mode.”

“Thanks, Carm,” Price told the ex-FBI agent. “I’m almost in the tunnel now.”

“See you in a minute,” Delahunt said.

Price put her phone away, entered the tunnel that joined the main house to the Annex and got into the light electric rail car. The engine began to hum and the vehicle quickly picked up speed as it shot down the underground tunnel. Things were starting to click, to come together, and Price could feel the tingle she had first felt as a mission controller for long-range operations conducted by the National Security Agency. It had been there that she had made her bones in the intelligence business before being recruited by Hal Brognola to run logistics and support at the more covert Stony Man operation.

Stony Man had operated as a clandestine antiterrorist operation since long before the infamous attacks of September 11 had put all of America’s military, intelligence and law-enforcement efforts on the same page. As such, it operated as it always had—under the direct control of the White House and separate from both the Joint Special Operations Command and the Directorate of National Intelligence.

Stony Man had been given carte blanche to operate at peak efficiency, eliminating oversights and legalities in the name of pragmatic results. It also, perhaps most importantly, offered the U.S. government the ability to disavow any knowledge of operations that went badly. It was a brutal truth that if things turned wrong for the Stony Man action teams, Phoenix Force and Able Team, they would be left out in the cold.

It was one of Barbara Price’s most sincere prayers that she would never be called upon to make the decision that left compromised operators hanging in the wind.

She pushed aside the morose reflections as the electric car slowed and she exited the vehicle, then entered the Annex building after passing through security. Things were ready to go hot—she could not afford to be distracted now.

As she stepped into the Computer Room, she was met by Aaron Kurtzman, the wheelchair-bound head of cybernetics at Stony Man Farm. The big man reached out and handed her a steaming mug of coffee. She eyed the ink-colored liquid dubiously.

“Thanks, Aaron. That’s just what I’ve been missing. Something that can put hair on my chest.”

“David called for Phoenix Force in Marseilles,” he said, grinning. “They’re set up to go in the hotel. Carl did the same for Able Team in Louisiana. They’re in the air and heading toward the target.”

“Good,” Price said. She took a drink of the strong coffee and pulled a face. “Once we’re sure everything is unfolding, I’ll give Hal a call and he can pass the information on to the President.”

Kurtzman glided over to his work area, where it looked as if a bomb had exploded. His desk was covered in faxes, paperwork and the exposed wiring of half a dozen devices.

Across the room at his workstation, fingers flying across a laptop while monitoring a sat com link, Akira Tokaido bobbed his head in time to the music coming from a single earbud. The lean, compact hacker was the youngest member of Stony Man’s cybernetics team and the heir apparent to Kurtzman himself. The Japanese-American cyberpunk had at times worked virtual magic when Price had needed him to.

Across the room from Tokaido sat his polar opposite. Professor Huntington Wethers had come to the Stony Man operations from his position on the teaching faculty of UC Berkeley. The tall, distinguished black man sported gray hair at his temples and an unflappable manner. He currently worked two laptop screens as a translation program fed him information from monitored radio traffic coming out of France.

Carmen Delahunt walked through the door of Computer Room and made a beeline for Barbara Price. The only female on the Farm’s cyberteam, Delahunt served as a pivotal balance between Tokaido’s hotshot hacking magic and Wethers’s more restrained, academic style.

Delahunt finished her conversation and snapped her cell phone shut as she walked up to Price. She pointed toward the newspaper in the mission controller’s hand.

“You see that about Sincanaros?” she asked. “As soon as I saw that name, it rang a bell. I ran a profile—not pretty.”

Price smiled. “You read my mind, Carmen,” she said. “Once we have Phoenix and Able taken care of, why don’t you send me a summary in case anything comes of it.”

“Will do.” Delahunt nodded. “I have to double-check the Mediterranean arrangements we made for Phoenix’s extraction with the ‘package.’ It’s nice to be able to tap the resources of larger groups like the Agency, but coordination is a nightmare.”

“Let me know if anything goes wrong,” Price said.

Delahunt nodded, then turned and began to walk back across the floor toward the connecting door to the Annex’s Communications center, her fingers punching out a number on her encrypted cell phone.

Price smiled.

She could feel the energy, the sense of purpose that permeated the room, flow into her. Out there in the cold, eight men on two teams were about to enter into danger for the sake of their country. If they got into trouble, if they needed anything, they would turn to her and her people.

She did not intend to let them down.

She made her way to a nearby desk where a light flashing on the desktop phone let her know a call was holding. She looked over at Kurtzman and saw the man returning a telephone handset to its cradle. He pointed toward her.

“It’s Hal on line one,” he said.

“Thanks, Aaron,” she answered.

She set her coffee and paper down and picked up the handset. She put the phone to her ear.

“Hal, it’s Barb,” she said.

“I’m holding for the President on the other line,” Brognola said from his Justice Department office. “Are the men up and rolling?”

“As we speak,” Price answered. “Tell him both operations are prepped to launch.”

“All right. Let’s hope this one goes by the numbers,” the gruff federal agent said.

“As always,” she agreed, and hung up.

“All right, people,” she announced to the room. “Let’s roll.”

CHAPTER ONE

Lost Parish, New Orleans, Louisiana

The men hung from chains.

Gabriel Gonzales turned his blindfolded head and spit blood from his mouth. His lips were swollen and his teeth loose from where the Zetas gunmen had smashed a rifle butt into his face. His nose had been broken, so the act of spitting left him breathless. He quickly sucked in air, trying not to choke on blood. The air was stale and tinged with the harsh chemical smell of spilled oil.

His arms screamed in their sockets, and Gonzales pushed his toes against the concrete floor beneath his feet to give them some relief. Around him he heard the moans and shuffling of the two other men hanging next to him. He didn’t know who they were, as they had already been bound and blindfolded in the back of the Lincoln Navigator SUV when he’d been picked up.

Let them have gotten my call, he prayed silently.

The sound of vibrating corrugated metal reached him as a door slammed. The noise echoed in hollow tones and Gonzales realized he had to be inside a large structure, such as an abandoned factory or, more probably, an empty warehouse. He heard the sounds of boot soles striking the floor as a group of men muttering low in Spanish moved closer.

He heard Lagos and his heart sank. The man was speaking rapidly, and after a moment Gonzales realized he had to be on his cell phone because he was talking to his mysterious patron, the Frenchman “Henri.”

This is going to hurt, he realized, and felt hopeless tears well up in his eyes behind the filthy cloth that covered them. When Lagos got off the phone with Henri, violent things always followed. There was a snap of hard plastic as a cell phone was shut. A snarling baritone growled an order and suddenly the blindfold was ripped from his eyes.

Powerful headlights snapped on, burning into his eyes and keeping him blinded. Gonzales tried to turn his head away from the painful, high-intensity beams. He didn’t need his eyes to recognize the voice in command: Lagos was here and Gabriel Gonzales realized he was going to die. There was no doubt anymore, he was a dead man. All that remained was the suffering.

J ACK G RIMALDI BANKED the Hughes 500MD Scout Defender hard in the darkness. The helicopter settled down into a hover some ten feet above the dark ground. All around the veteran pilot the devastation of Hurricane Katrina spread in a broken tableau of ruin and debris years after the storm had struck.

Behind him acres of swamp stretched toward the tide tables nestled against the sea, while in front of him mud-caked rubble in geometrically spaced piles marked where houses and stores had once stood along roads. It looked like a war zone, even in the yellow moonlight, a ghostly boneyard of destruction and destroyed lives.

Reconstruction had passed this Parish by. The residents had been too poor, the neighborhood too peripheral to the campaign aspirations of politicians. This was an area the hurricane could keep as New Orleans fought its way back from the devastation.

But power abhorred a vacuum. The Zetas—former members of the army who had gone over to the dark side—had come to claim the forgotten place for themselves. The hard-core drug smugglers had found little in the way of opposition when they had first arrived. All of that was about to change.

The three men of Able Team leaped from the hovering helicopter and entered the stifling heat of the Louisiana night.

L AGOS SNATCHED G ONZALES by the hair and twisted his face around. Ignoring the pain, Gonzales stared dully into the eyes of the former Mexican army special-operations soldier. The eyes stared back at him, black and empty like the dull, lifeless eyes of a shark. Devoid of emotion. What was happening was just business.

Lagos leaned in close to the sweating Gonzales and behind him the bound man could see the hulking forms of Lagos’s men, all of them wearing balaclava hoods and holding weapons. Gonzales rolled his eyes around to try to get a better look at the men hanging with him, but Lagos held him firmly. His breath smelled like cigarette smoke.

“Was it you?” Lagos whispered. “Did you betray us?”

“No, I swear—” Gonzales began lying.

Lagos released his hold on the hanging man’s hair and stepped back. He lifted his arm and backhanded Gonzales across the face, cutting off his protests. Lagos was a powerful man fuelled by a daily cocaine habit. The blow hurt.

Gonzales’s head rocked back and he winced at the sudden, stinging pain. He stumbled backward, toes barely in contact with the ground, to the end of his chain and then was unceremoniously swung back toward his abuser.

Lagos stepped in close as Gonzales stumbled forward, planting his fist in the hanging man’s midriff. Gonzales gasped and the muscles of his diaphragm spasmed painfully. He sucked in a breath, and Lagos snapped the top of his hand, extended in a flat blade, into Gonzales’s vulnerable groin.

Agony stole Gonzales’s sight. He moaned low as the sharp pain was almost instantaneously replaced by a dull, spreading ache.

God help me, he thought. It’s just beginning.

C ARL L YONS HELD UP an arm and then sank down on one leg, resting on his ballistic armor knee pad. Behind him the other two members of Able Team, Rosario “Politician” Blancanales and Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz, copied his stance.

Lyons let his automatic shotgun hang from the strap over his shoulder and pointed out toward the team’s twelve-o’clock position. Through a break in an acre-size lot of soggy timber, busted concrete and twisted rebar sat the low squat shape of an undamaged warehouse. Parked in front of the building, which spilled brilliant white halogen light through its cracks, were a dark, 1970s Dodge van and an H3 Hummer with a shiny black carapace.

“There they are,” Lyons said quietly. The six foot two, two-hundred-pound man turned his attention back to his target.

Clutching a Steyr AUG bullpup-designed assault rifle, Schwarz moved into position closer to team leader Carl Lyons. Behind them Blancanales leaned in to hear their conversation as he covered the periphery with his H&K MP-5 SD-3 submachine gun.

Blancanales put a finger to the communication piece in his ear. “We’re on-site and doing initial recon.”

“Copy,” Barbara Price answered. “Our coverage of local police channels put friendlies way outside your area of operation. Over.”

“Roger. Able out,” Blancanales murmured.

“Two vehicles,” Schwarz muttered, scanning the structure. “But big vehicles. Anywhere from five to ten guys. All former Zetas.”

“Sounds about right,” Lyons said, nodding.

Their briefing on the last-minute search-and-rescue operation had given them little to go on other than a target—Gabriel Gonzales, CIA confidential informant—and a location gathered by triangulating the man’s cell-phone signal. As part of his payment, the CIA had provided Gonzales, a former Mexican border patrol agent turned narcotic trafficker, with a state-of-the-art cell phone. The CIA had also added the location tracer buried in the body of the lightweight device.

As valuable as Gonzales might have been to drug-enforcement agencies, the CIA had turned a blind eye to his narcotics profiteering to concentrate on his anti-terrorism capabilities. It was a Faustian arrangement made common by the necessities of a post-9/11 world.

Gonzales granted the U.S. intelligence community a much-needed window into the realities of the growing, solidifying world of narco-terror. Organizations such as the former Mexican special-forces group turned drug runners, the Zetas and the violent international MS13 gang had begun to overlap with the intelligence agencies of Venezuela and the heroin syndicates of Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

Wherever there was illicit money to be made, there was an opportunity for black funds to flow into the operational coffers of terrorist organizations. It was a situation that Able Team had faced more than once.

“Let’s move in closer,” Lyons said. “But first scan with your optics. If there are sentries outside, they may well have night-vision gear. We’ll exploit the range of your sniper scope.”

“I see all,” Schwarz whispered as he shuffled forward.

Schwarz raised the Steyr AUG A3 to his shoulder. The A3 was the carbine configuration of the classic bullpup assault rifle with a shortened 16-inch barrel. The standard factory-mounted sighting optics had been replaced by Stony Man armorer John “Cowboy” Kissinger with a Picatinny mounting rail upon which he placed a 1.5X-telescope containing a circle aiming reticle.

A low, full moon hung over the scene, providing enough ambient light for the three-man special-operations team to operate without night-vision equipment.

Schwarz flinched once as the 1.5X magnification qualities of his sniper scope suddenly presented him with vision of a huge rat running lightly along an exposed section of plumbing until it disappeared into the open mouth of an overturned toilet.

He settled back, ignoring the pungent stench of the flood area. The humidity was stifling and the Able Team commando sweated freely under the black smears of his camouflage grease paint. He scanned the target building in vectors, his brain reducing the activity to simplified angles and precise geometric patterns.

“Nothing outside,” he said. “At least not from this angle…Wow, hold on.” A bright set of headlights suddenly appeared out of the ruins on the far side of the building.

Schwarz turned his weapon toward the new threat stimulus and dampened the passive feed on his scope even further.

“Holy crap,” he whispered. “It’s a McLaren F1!”

“I know I’m going to be sorry I asked, but what’s a McLaren F1?” Lyons asked.

Without preamble, and in the hushed tones of a small boy describing a cherished toy, Schwarz rattled off the car’s specks. “The F1 was the fastest production car ever made, and they only made one hundred of them. It’s got a 6.1-liter BMW S70 V12 engine, and it’ll go over 230 mph easy, without turbo or supercharges. Price tag? Well north of a cool million, my man.”

“Who the hell would drop that kind of money on such a classic supercar and then drive it into this mess?” Blancanales asked.

Schwarz shook his head as the metallic-silver supercar pulled in next to the SUVs and the bat-wing doors rose like something out of a science-fiction movie. “Anyone who’d do this is a bad, bad person. I think we’ll have to kill them all.”

“Suits me,” Lyons answered. “I freakin’ hate Zetas.”

Schwarz let out a low whistle. “Does she look like any Zetas you’ve ever seen?”

A tiny, delicate foot in a wraparound stiletto heel emerged from the darkness of the McLaren F1 and came to rest on the damp gravel. The leg attached to the thousand-dollar shoe seemed to go on for miles. Even in the poor light and across the distance, Able Team could see it was a million-dollar leg.

The young woman emerged from the McLaren F1. A sheer white blouse was knotted below her full breasts just above her red plaid miniskirt. Her hair was raven-wing black and hung in long, loose curls over a heart-shaped face.

“Oh. That’s very Britney Spears,” Schwarz breathed. “Very ‘I’m Not So Innocent.’”

“Please,” Lyons said. “It’s ‘Oops…I Did It Again’ and it’s so 2001 it makes me laugh.”

Blancanales’s head snapped around to stare at the Able Team leader. Schwarz removed his eye from the sniper scope, his mouth hanging open in shock.

“Um, you into pop princesses?” he asked.

“Shut up. She’s been all over the news, that’s all,” Lyons snapped.

Schwarz turned his head toward Blancanales. He could see the stocky Latino preparing a sarcastic riposte and felt his own laughter bubbling up in his throat.

Then the screaming began.

G ONZALES BEGAN to shiver in fear.

Lagos moved between the men hanging from the ceiling like slabs of meat at a slaughterhouse. He lit a cigarette. Beyond the lights the hulking figures of his men were reduced to nondescript shadows.

The man hanging on Gonzales’s left started to mumble a prayer to the Virgin Mary in rapid Spanish. There was the sudden sharp, acrid smell of urine as one of the men let his bladder go. Lagos chuckled and blew out a blue cloud of cigarette smoke.

“The people,” Lagos said, “they don’t understand that what we do is hard work. They think moving product is like being a rock star. You bang models and party all the time. Sometime you have to be like, uh, the Tony Soprano and use your gun. Right?”

Lagos moved around to stand in front of Gonzales. He regarded the hanging prisoner like some insect he’d found crushed on the sole of his shoe. He blew smoke into Gonzales’s face, then reached up with one hand and snatched the informant by the chin. Lagos locked eyes with his prey.

“But we know the truth, don’t we?” Lagos gritted. “We know it is hard goddamn work making our money. And the ladies aren’t the only things we bang, eh?”

From behind Lagos his men chuckled. To the terrified Gonzales it sounded like hyenas regarding a wounded gazelle. He was close enough to Lagos to see the black clogged pores of the man’s nose. There was a tiny residue of white powder around the edge of one of his cavernous nostrils. The man’s eyes blazed as bloodshot as a rabid dog’s. Gonzales squeezed his own eyes shut and tried to turn away. Lagos’s fingers were like steel bands on his face, and they burned his flesh with his intense body heat.

“One of you bitches knows about Bellicose Dawn.” Lagos released Gonzales’s face and stepped back. “None of you should know about my Bellicose Dawn. Before I am finished, the one who knows will tell me what he knows. But since I will kill that person, I don’t expect anyone to volunteer the information. So we were talking about hard work again, right? Getting the one of you to confess will be hard work. Just as keeping my woman happy can be hard work.”

Lagos turned his back on the hanging men and walked past the halogen lamp setup. With his back to the men, his voice rolled across the warehouse away from them, echoed off the thin metal walls then bounced back, ringing evilly in their ears.

“So I…What do the gringos say? Yes. I can kill…I can kill two birds with one bush. Or get two stones in my palm. Something. Fuck it. My woman, she likes to hurt people who’ve disappointed me. For her it is not such hard work.”

Lagos turned and faced the men, now a faceless shadow behind the lights that blinded them.

“It gets her very worked up, if you understand what I mean.” On cue, his thugs laughed. “So I win. I don’t have to do the work. I get my information. My lady is happy. Then she makes me happy. See? Everybody wins, yes?” Lagos paused and his dry chuckle trailed off. “Well, I am guessing not everyone. Not you, eh, bitches?”

From behind Gonzales one of the other two men began to scream.

“L ET’S MOVE IN ,” Lyons said.

He rose off his knee and swept up the 12-gauge shotgun. Behind him Blancanales and Schwarz stood in smooth unison, their weapons sweeping up and tracking toward the danger zone.

In well-practiced motions the team approached its objective. Lyons raced forward several yards, then took cover behind some debris. He brought his drum-fed shotgun up, providing cover as his teammates jogged quickly past him. Twenty yards up, they dropped to their knees behind solid piles of junk and covered Lyon’s bunny-hop motion. Able Team repeated the maneuver three more times before coming to the last bit of cover—an overturned and waterlogged Ford Taurus.

Lyons scanned the area around the building and saw no sentries. He made a V out of his index and middle fingers and gestured toward his eyes, then pointed toward a window on the side of the building.

Immediately, Schwarz rose, Steyr AUG up, and ghosted across the muddy gravel toward the four-pane window. He crouched beneath the opening, then slowly straightened until he was peeking inside. He remained motionless for nearly a minute, soaking in every detail.

From inside, there was the sound of a little gas-powered engine and the screams had turned to shrieks.

“Jesus,” Blancanales muttered. He lifted a finger to the cell attachment in his ear. “Stony Base, Able is about to make entry.”

“Copy,” Price answered, her voice still cool. “Jack, go ahead and bring the Little Bird in over site.”

“Roger,” Grimaldi answered.

From out over the swamp Able Team could suddenly pick up the whir and hum of the Little Bird helicopter. It formed a rhythmic droning punctuated by the shrieks of the torture victims.

From the window Schwarz turned back toward his unit. He held up his hand and spread the fingers. Five. He closed his hand into a fist, then opened it again. Five more. He closed his hand once more then held up three fingers. Thirteen total.

Lyons nodded once, his head moving sharply.

“Let’s roll,” he said.

CHAPTER TWO

France

T HOMAS J ACKSON H AWKINS sat in the lobby of the Marseilles hotel. His com-link earpiece as inconspicuous as the newspaper he pretended to study in the crowd of EU powerbrokers. He read the story about a Venezuelan named Sincanaros connected to the improper campaign finances of a Maryland senator with genuine disgust. Underneath the rest of his paper, thrown casually to the lobby side of his little café table, was a parabolic mike designed to look like a cell phone.

The electronic device pointed toward the front desk and the pickup fed directly into the modified microphone Hawkins wore in his ear.

The Phoenix Force commando sipped his espresso and idly scanned the page of newsprint in his hands, searching for good news and killing time until the mark showed herself. He was the point man on this snatch operation.

A Joint Special Operations Command task force had pulled a prepaid cell phone off the corpse of a Chechen master bombmaker during a black op in Karachi, Pakistan. The redial option had revealed a Luxembourg prefix and number. Intrigued, JSOC had passed the information on to their CIA counterparts.

Electronic and computer analysts had managed to track the number to a satellite phone purchased by a Saudi Arabian construction company specializing in the sale of heavy equipment and suppression of oil-well fires in Africa and Southwest Asia.

The only representative of the company in Luxembourg during the appropriate time frame had been one Nayef al-Shalaan, who had turned out to be a very interesting person. He drew a generous salary from a construction company that was owned by one of the currently eight hundred Saudi princes. A prince who also happened to be al-Shalaan’s father.

Al-Shalaan had a degree in communications from Jordon College in Oxford and a master’s degree in finance from Princeton University. He enjoyed diplomatic immunity as House of Saud royalty, and he was an expert at brokering deals around UN mandates. Though a great deal of animosity had existed between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Saudi Arabia, al-Shalaan hadn’t allowed that to get in the way of profit, and he had managed to wed up several companies connected to French politicians with the Jordanian representatives of the Iraqi oil ministry during what would come to be known as the UN Oil-for-Food scandal, taking considerable amounts in money and favors in broker fees from both sides.

His connections with Sunni intelligence agents of the Special Republican Guard had continued after the U.S. invasion, and he’d grown rich channeling the finances of the Ramadi and Fallujah insurgents through Damascus and out to global points. Al-Shalaan was the very definition of a high-value target. The black bag surveillance specialists rolling out of Langley had gone right to work.

In short time the frequency for al-Shalaan’s personal cell phone had been ascertained, triangulated and captured. Once his personal communications were cracked, a whole world of intelligence had opened up to U.S. agencies.

Then al-Shalaan had started transferring funds for men believed to be the bodyguards of Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s number two. Al-Zawahiri was an Egyptian doctor and important figure in the radical Islamic Jihad group founded there, and was tied to many acts of terror designed to weaken and overthrow the secular North African state.

Suddenly the CIA had a problem. The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency had put in a daily intelligence estimate that al-Shalaan, a prince of an important ally in the war on terror with diplomatic immunity, had suddenly come to the attention of another important ally: the brutal Egyptian GDSSI, or General Directorate for State Security Investigations. If al-Shalaan was going down, then the U.S. wanted him all to themselves.

Coordinating the intelligence cross-pollination, the DNI had gone to the Oval Office with his take on the situation. Al-Shalaan had to disappear. Taking the matter out of CIA hands, the President had gone to Stony Man.

Al-Shalaan was going to be pulled out of his Marseilles penthouse suite one step ahead of a black-ops squad of GDSSI agents. The resources available were scant. The time frame was ridiculously tight, the potential operational blowback a PR nightmare. Kidnapping a Saudi prince was unthinkable, even one that was a known facilitator of terror.

Phoenix Force got the job.

One number on al-Shalaan’s phone had unfailingly come up in connection to his stay at the five-star Marseilles resort—the number to a very high-priced, very exclusive dominatrix for hire.

The Langley profilers had been nonplussed by the revelation that al-Shalaan liked to be spanked and humiliated. And submissives like the Saudi were willing to pay large sums of money to secure a professional dominant.

Monica Bellucci was such a woman.

Hawkins sat up in his seat, then studiously turned his attention to his paper. Bellucci had walked into the lobby. The Phoenix Force commando nonchalantly reached under his folded newspaper and turned up the volume on the parabolic microphone. The smooth technology fed the passive signals into his earpiece so well he might have been standing at the woman’s shoulder.

Her voice was a smooth, husky alto, the kind, Hawkins thought, that would cause a man’s heart to race when it whispered into his ear.

The concierge gave her a sealed envelope and a key card. Turning, she strode across the lobby toward the gilded doors of the elevator with more grace than an Italian runway model.

The concierge, an effete, overly trim man, stood there looking slightly stunned, then his face regained its normal polite impassivity and he turned to help another guest.

Hawkins snorted to himself as he clicked the parabolic mike. His finger touched his throat mike. “We’ve got the room number,” he said, standing.

I N THE ROOM , B ELLUCCI went through her ritual. Her overcoat came off, revealing the strapless black rubber dress beneath. The garment fit like a latex glove over a body that could easily pull it off, and there was no doubt that she wore nothing underneath. A black ribbon was tied in a choker around her throat, usually a sign of submissiveness in the bondage and domination world, but just part of her costume in this case. She set down her designer bag and reached inside, removing a coil of soft cord, a riding crop and a prescription pill bottle. Leaving the implements behind her on the entrance table where her customer would notice them immediately upon entering, she took the pill bottle over to the suite’s bar.

Her eyes already glassy, she washed down three OxyContin tablets with two ounces of Bombay gin.

Though she spoke French flawlessly, the stunning blonde was German by way of Switzerland. She had always been drawn to older men, established men with influence and financial means. She had learned in her first year at the exclusive Paris university that married men of the jet set treated their mistresses very well.

She had accepted her first assignation—Bellucci did not turn tricks—at twenty. Her current lover, an assets manager with the World Bank, had come to her frantic. Somehow a South African intelligence agent had gathered evidence of his insider trading involving relief funds going into Liberia.

Desperate enough to offend his beautiful mistress, he’d pleaded with her to get into the man’s suite and steal the documents, knowing full well what it would require of her. The thrill that had shivered through her body when she felt the weight of the envelope containing the equivalent of ten thousand U.S. dollars—and what that money was buying—had been unforgettable.

She wore out the overweight, middle-aged South African government agent then rummaged his embassy-provided suite at her leisure and obtained the documents. Making copies for her own, soon-to-be-growing personal files, she’d promptly demanded another ten thousand before turning them over to her lover.

Realizing the potential of the situation, Bellucci had turned professional for the diplomatic community. Soon after, she quickly learned she liked her sex rough and her little black book, actually a PDA database, was filled with men, occasionally their wives and often their full-time mistresses, as well as a handful of female clients, who craved the release of a mistress with a capital M.

Almost immediately she had come to the attention of Henri Galli upon the recommendation of a powerful Venezuelan businessman named Marcos Sincanaros. She knew little about the man except that he was tied to the government in some shadowy fashion and that he paid very well. Under his patronage her career had truly blossomed.

She brought the cut-glass tumbler to her full, surgically enhanced lips and sipped. The gin gave off a scent that reminded her of pine trees as it sparkled tart on her tongue. Setting her drink down, she opened her purse on the bar and pulled out a blunt.

She licked the end of the marijuana cigar until it was wet, then took a vial out of her handbag and sprinkled a liberal amount of cocaine across the moistened end. Bringing the blunt to her mouth, she used an oversize lighter to fire it up.

The pungent smoke and aromatized cocaine filled her lungs as she dragged and held it in. The blood from her pounding heart rushed to her head, making her dizzy, followed immediately by a wave of pleasant euphoria. She felt simultaneously mellow and keyed up. The feeling would continue as her body absorbed the primary agents of her OxyContin painkillers.

She left the smoldering blunt in a fine crystal ashtray and wandered deeper into the suite, looking for the stereo system.

H AWKINS ENTERED THE ROOM on the fifth floor of the resort, some seven floors down from al-Shalaan’s penthouse suite. Inside, the rest of Phoenix Force was going over its last-minute preparations for the operation.

Calvin James sat on a chair in front of the wrought-iron-and-glass coffee table situated in the center of the room. With quick, efficient motions he was securing the glass vials of Versed and succhyil chlorate into the loading chambers of the pneumatic injectors each of the team would carry in addition to a personal backup pistol.

James, a former medic with the U.S. Navy SEALs, had explained the drug in detail to the team prior to deployment from Stony Man. Erring on the side of safety, for his team, James had calculated doses for a 210-pound male. The pistol-shaped injectors made sharp clicking sounds as he set them down on the glass tabletop.

He looked up as Hawkins entered the room. “What’s up, T.J.?”

“Everything’s still good. I waited around until al-Shalaan showed up to confirm the numbers on his entourage. We’re still five-by-five for our sitrep.”

James nodded, then spoke into his throat mike. “T.J. confirms sitrep,” he said to the team leader, David McCarter. The ex-SAS commando was the team member with by far the most driving expertise on the team. He was waiting in a H3 Hummer converted into a stretch limousine downstairs across the street from the loading dock at the back of the five-star hotel. The vehicle was perfect camouflage in the upscale setting.

James listened to the reply for a second, a grin growing larger on his face. “Copy. Out,” he said.

“Let me guess,” Gary Manning said from across the room. The big Canadian was attaching a sound suppressor to the specially threaded barrel of a Glock 17 pistol. “David’s still pissed he’s not cracking skulls on this one.”

“Oh, you know how you alpha males like your skull cracking.” James laughed.

Manning snorted. “If that anesthesia works half as well as you say, there shouldn’t be any skull cracking going on.”

“It’ll take a minute,” James admitted, and set the last injector down. “But with the adrenaline going, their hearts’ll push the drug through their system just fine. They’ll be out of commission even before they go under.”

Rafael Encizo spoke up. “I’ve told Barb we’re about to go live.”

The stocky little Cuban walked into the central living area from the master bedroom. Like Manning, he wore a shoulder holster holding a silenced Glock 17. He shrugged on a leather jacket to hide his shoulder rig and tucked the tail of his short-sleeved shirt into the back of his faded jeans.

Manning stepped forward. “Okay, Rafe,” he said. “You lost rock-paper-scissors, so you’re the drunk.”

“It’s bullshit, you know,” Encizo answered, crossing to the bar. “If anyone should be the drunk, it should be T.J.”

“This is subterfuge,” James said. “Not real life.”

“I’m right here,” Hawkins complained. “I’m standing right here.”

“You want to be the drunk?” James asked, his voice dry.

“No. I’m good, thanks,” Hawkins said.

“Not the vodka,” Manning said as Encizo picked up a bottle of clear liquor from the suite bar. “It doesn’t stink enough. Use the Beefeater gin.”

The Phoenix Force pro upended half a bottle over himself. Instantly the room stank of pine needles over the abrasive smell of grain alcohol. Hawkins and Manning quickly backed up to keep from being splashed. Encizo kept a grip on the bottle and grinned at them.

“Don’t be shy, boys. I’m not heavy, I’m your brother.”

Manning and Hawkins quickly took their auto-injectors from James and tucked them into the small of their backs. Encizo put his arms around the shoulders of the two men, prepping for his role as incoherent drunk.

“This is all very Nancy Drew,” Hawkins muttered.

“Nancy Drew used to pretend to get drunk?” Manning demanded, incredulous.

“She wore disguises and stuff,” Hawkins said. “Besides, Rafe’s really more of a Bess.”

“Bess?” James asked from behind them. The team began to move toward the door to their room. “Who the hell is Bess?”

“She was Nancy’s fat friend.”

“Hey!” the stocky Encizo protested.

“They always said she was pretty, though,” Hawkins said quickly.

“I am pretty,” Encizo agreed as Manning pulled the door to the room open.

“Why do you know so much about Nancy Drew? Is there something you aren’t telling us?”

“Don’t ask, don’t tell.” Hawkins fired the standard U.S. military quip right back.

James fingered his com link. “We’re rolling,” he said.

“Copy,” McCarter answered from the vehicle.

“Copy,” Price echoed from Stony Man.

Phoenix Force moved down the hall toward the elevator.

CHAPTER THREE

Gonzales felt his heart sink. He watched Marta, Lagos’s woman, stroll into the warehouse through the door and walk into the light of the halogen lamps. At twenty, the former call girl and Mexico City porn star was a sight to behold. Her nails were painted in blood-red and her left hand held a lollipop she worked like a pro.

Her big, brown eyes widened in mock surprise as she regarded the hanging men. Her pink tongue lathed the head of the lollipop.

She giggled.

Lagos moved up behind her and whispered something into her ear. She reached up and traced her hand down the angular line of his face. If the violent drug kingpin had a weakness, it was this young female prostitute.

Despite himself, Gonzales’s eyes were drawn to the smooth line of her flat stomach where a tiny gold hoop had been inserted in her navel. She wore no bra, and her nipples poked hard against the sheer fabric of her blouse. The skin on her body was flawless.

Gonzales felt his stomach turn queasy.

Her perfume, something heavy and expensive, rolled into his nose, momentarily overpowering the stink of body fluids and terror that surrounded him. His mind recoiled from his terror, his thoughts rebounding like a rubber ball in an empty room. He thought about his little girl and his wife. He flashed on images of the bodies of people he’d seen who’d suffered at the hands of the Zetas.

He felt tears welling up in his eyes and he used the last vestiges of his pride to blink them back as Marta, at once sadistic and seductive, glided forward. She leaned in close, her beauty a blunt instrument, her breath hot and sweet against his neck, the crush of her heavy breast hard against his stomach. When she spoke, she purred, but her voice was the singsong soprano of a little girl.

“You were naughty,” she chided. “So naughty, and now you must be punished. I remember you from that restaurant in Cancún. Do you remember, Gabriel?”

Gonzales nodded. He’d worn a wire designed to passively boost the conversation for the CIA surveillance team’s parabolic boom mike. Lagos had met with a Venezuelan moneyman named Sincanaros and a representative of FARC, the Colombian Communist insurgent army and largest narco-military in the world. Marta had been there, dressed in a stunning little black dress that cost about as much as a U.S. union plumber made in a year. She’d cooed and rubbed her thighs together throughout the meeting, flustering even the experienced Colombian guerrilla commander.

“I remember,” Gonzales said, his voice hoarse.

“Lagos wanted me to act naughty that night,” she said. Her expression was coy, childlike. “Do you remember me being naughty? How I touched myself while everyone watched?”

Gonzales closed his eyes. He felt his gorge rising and from his churning, fear-cramped stomach, acid bubbled up and burned the lining of his esophagus. He winced in pain.

Marta’s tiny little hand found Gonzales’s crotch. He flinched. “I think you were excited that night,” she said. “I was so naughty.” She let go and stepped back. “Tonight is going to be a little different.”

From the small of her back the young woman produced a pearl-handled switchblade. She held it out and Gonzales closed his eyes again. He heard the greasy click as the tightly wound spring released the knife. He opened his eyes and saw the 5-inch blade wildly reflecting the light of the halogen lamps.

“Let’s see what’s going on with Gabriel.” Marta giggled.

She dug the point of her blade into the denim fabric of his jeans at his fly. He winced as she poked the soft skin of his inner thigh, and he felt blood trickle down his leg. Marta worked, grunting softly with the effort, to cut away the fabric around his crotch.

In seconds his penis hung exposed. The crushing weight of his helpless vulnerability slammed into him all over again. Only the thought of his wife and daughter kept his tongue still.

Marta stepped back and slid the still-open switchblade behind the buckle of her wide, black belt. The pearl handle rested against the smooth, brown stretch of her flat abdomen.

She turned her head and barked a command. A short, squat gunman stepped forward.

Gonzales’s eyes bulged from his head, and he moaned out loud despite his efforts to stifle the sound. Marta giggled again.

“No, don’t start it,” she snapped. “I want to start it.”

“Sí,” the man said. He stepped back, handing the orange-and-black power grass trimmer to the slight young woman. The muscles of her arms stood out in vivid relief as she mastered the weight. The long orange extension cord trailed out behind her, disappearing into the dark beyond the halogen lights.

The grass trimmer sprang to life in her hands, the 18-volt power tool screaming as the hard plastic cord spun at 7000 revolutions per minute. Gonzales realized the device would tear his clothes from his body, then flay his flesh open in a techno-modern version of the ancient Chinese “death of a thousand cuts.” His throat closed in his fear.

Marta grinned. “This is my favorite weapon. Its trademarked system uses centrifugal force to advance the line automatically as I need it.”

The twisted Lolita rattled off the grass trimmer’s specs in English with obvious enthusiasm, the way the proud owner of an American muscle car or an Italian Ferrari might talk about their automobile engine. Goddamn you, Yankees, he cursed his involvement with the CIA who had left him to die after his service.

Gunning the motor, Marta stepped forward. Her expression was twisted now, her grin so wide it threatened to split her face in two. Behind her, Lagos and his men had shuffled forward, their laughter almost muted by the high-pitched whine of the grass trimmer’s 7.1-liter engine.

Still Gonzales didn’t talk. He thought about it. If he did so, he might spare the other two men hours of torture. They were all dead, but maybe the other two men would be granted a quick coup de grâce if only Gonzales spoke up now.

Then he thought about his daughter and his wife. If he didn’t remain silent, they’d be raped, then they’d be tortured.

No.

Gonzales offered up silent apologies to the other men and then bit down so hard on his tongue to keep silent that it bled.

Marta stepped forward and the spinning plastic cord whipped into his leg just above the knee. The denim split like paper and his flesh was lacerated so deep into the flesh of the vastus medialis that blood splattered at 7000 revolutions per minute, spraying across the walls like a Jackson Pollock painting.

Gonzales screamed, then screamed again. White-hot lances of agony surged up through his body in bullet trains of anguish.

Engulfed in the shrieks and the screams produced by the little grass trimmer, only two of Lagos’s men, the ones nearest the door, heard the window breaking.

Marta stepped in again and thrust the grass trimmer forward. The spinning plastic cord bit Gonzales’s inner thigh. Blood splashed her face in streaks like tiger stripes, and unconsciously her slick pink tongue darted out to taste the hot fluid smearing her lips.

There was a scramble of bodies behind her shoulder as one Zetas gunman tried to shout a warning, then a flash like a sun going nova and a bang so loud it split eardrums. In the snap of a magician’s fingers Gonzales felt the concussion roll into him like the wind, punching him into motion on the end of his chains. He was blind. He was deaf. He was dizzy and bruised, confused and battered, as a second and then third flash-bang grenade went off.

The halogen light setup was knocked clear of its moorings and crashed to the floor, plunging the room into heavy shadow as a single brilliant lamp, now facedown, continued to burn. Men shouted in pain and confusion and anger as the front door of the building was smashed open.

Gadgets Schwarz thrust the barrel of his Steyr AUG through the smashed window glass and saw a dark shape pulling itself up off the floor, a long weapon in its hands. Schwarz squeezed the trigger and put a 5.56 mm round into the figure, then fired three more.

The figure went down and Schwarz pivoted smoothly, spotting a cluster of shapes directly behind the tangled mess of the halogen lights. He held back on his trigger and snapped the shortened barrel in a tight Z-pattern, burning a short burst into the crowd. Bodies hit the floor.

Carl Lyons entered through the warehouse door, his Atchisson autoshotgun testing the strength of his thick arms. The selective fire assault shotgun was fed with a 20-round drum magazine attachment and Lyons kept it tucked in close against his body, firing from the hip in such tight quarters.

He saw a balaclava hardman jump to his feet directly in front of the door, an old-fashioned Ingram MAC-10 in the grip of a fist covered by black, fingerless gloves. A sound suppressor as long as the weapon itself preceded the weapon like a black wand.

The Atchisson boomed in Lyons’s grip. The weapon recoiled smoothly into the ex-LAPD officer’s hip. The 12-gauge fléchette round discharged into the Zetas’s upturned face from a distance of less than three feet.

The tiny steel darts ripped through the flesh on the right side of the ex-commando’s face and drove mercilessly into the man’s skull. The back of the Mexican drug soldier’s head erupted, and the man’s body followed the momentum of his pulverized skull.

As blood spilled out of the ruined body, Lyons moved into the room. Behind him, Blancanales peeled off to the right, the H&K submachine gun up and ready in his hands.

Able Team moved in a tight configuration, a well-rehearsed ballet of trajectories and overlapping fields of fire. No motion was wasted as Schwarz anchored one section of the fire triangle and Blancanales another, letting Lyons and his autoshotgun move up the middle.

Blancanales tucked the folding stock of his submachine gun tight into his shoulder, the sound of Lyons’s booming shotgun ringing in his ears. He saw the silhouette of a man holding a Kalashnikov and cut loose, a burst of rounds striking the gunner high between the shoulder blades and punching through his neck.

The narco-soldier tumbled, and, in the light of the single halogen lamp burning facedown on the warehouse floor, Blancanales saw three men hanging from chains. A man he instantly recognized as Humberto Lagos pulled a Beretta 92-F pistol from a shoulder holster and put it to the temple of one of the bound prisoners. The Able Team commando snapped the sights of his submachine over the man’s head and his finger tightened on the smooth metal curve of his trigger.

A slight figure stumbled out of his periphery, coming between him and Lagos. To his surprise Blancanales saw that it was the young woman from the car. He leaped forward and grasped the noncombatant by the arm, still holding his weapon up in his hand. He caught a flash of beautiful brown eyes as he held the woman close. His stomach clenched as he saw the hanging prisoner jerk like a fish on the line as Lagos put a bullet through his head.

The former Mexican commando turned to face Blancanales and the Able Team operator caught a sudden flash of a scar across the man’s neck. It was ugly, the tissue raised so that it looked like a piece of red licorice.

Blancanales pulled the trigger on his weapon, the 9 mm Parabellum rounds chewing into Lagos like spinning lead buzz saws. The Mexican dropped straight down as his forehead was brutally cracked open.

Blancanales felt the panicked woman squirm in his grip with sudden violence, twisting hard against his hold. He heard her cry out and suddenly he felt an icy burn stab into his stomach. He gasped at the sudden agony and the twisting hellcat broke free from his grip.

There was a second impact down low and another sudden burst of agonizing fire. He looked down and saw the woman snatch a knife from his lower abdomen. He looked up and she was snarling as she yanked the knife back to stab him again.

His knees buckled in surprise and he fell to the floor, striking the ground hard on his buttocks. He looked up. The woman rose above him with the knife swept up above her head in both hands.

Marta screeched and snarled as she slashed downward. Blancanales felt his conscious mind snap like the shutter on a camera. Gone was the young woman in slutty heels and too much makeup. Gone was blazing pain low in his gut. Gone was the booming of Lyons’s shotgun or the chatter of Schwarz’s assault rifle. Gone were the stumbling, dying Zetas.

All that remained was threat and response as blackness swarmed up to claim him.

The H&K MP-5 jumped in his hand as if of its own volition. But even then he couldn’t bring himself to do what needed to be done. The MP-5 jumped as he used it like a blunt instrument, striking the young woman with rapid-fire jabs like a boxer in the ring, first in the kneecap to bring her down, then into the soft curves of her body. Her slight frame shuddered under the impacts and she fell backward as she dropped her knife.

His guts felt as if scalding salt water had been splashed in them, but his arm was like the lever on an oil derrick and he laid the muzzle upside her jaw with a sound like a branch snapping.

She tumbled farther backward and fell to her back. Her head made a low, dull sound as it bounced off the floor. The arteries running into the avulsions left by the gun sight spilled her young blood onto the concrete floor, mingling with the puddle already formed by the blood of Lagos’s still-warm corpse. Marta’s eyes rolled back in her head and her jaw hung slack in loose reflex as she was shoved into unconsciousness. Her lover’s eyes remained fixed and open on the scene as Blancanales’s closed into darkness.

CHAPTER FOUR

France

“Yes, Henri,” Monica Bellucci said into the phone. “I’ll have copies of his cell-phone logs to you by the morning. You just get my money.” She hung up the phone.

Bellucci carefully tapped out a small amount of cocaine from a gold phial onto a little silver spoon she wore on a Gucci chain around her neck. She put the spoon to her nostril and quickly snorted the bump. She heard the lock on the room door unlatch as the key card worked the electronic mechanism.

She set the phial on the countertop and leisurely turned toward the entryway. She spread her legs slightly on her outrageously high stilettos and the black rubber dress stretched tight across her narrow thighs. She felt the last bump of coke kick in. She was fully engaged in her role.

The suite door swung open and Nayef al-Shalaan stepped inside the suite. Behind him towered four burly bodyguards in dark suits. In contrast al-Shalaan was short, but his face was set in the harsh lines of a man used to getting his way.

His mahogany eyes fell to the table and widened in surprise as he saw what was positioned there, sitting in plain view. Bright dots of color appeared on his dusky cheeks as he realized his bodyguards could plainly see the coil of rope. The manacles. The riding crop.

“Outside,” he snapped.

Immediately the crew stepped back, their faces impeccably passive. Al-Shalaan slammed the door shut and the lock engaged. His eyes rose from the accoutrements and devoured Bellucci. His hunger was naked and exposed, and he drank in the sight of her.

“You must be more careful—” he began.

“Shut up!” she snapped.

Al-Shalaan was paying for a dominatrix, and he was going to get his money’s worth. As high as a kite, Bellucci stalked forward like a cat closing in on its prey. She slinked as she moved, almost crossing the line between sensuous and slatternly, but the razor-sharp edge of predatory energy remained.

“Shut your mouth,” she repeated. Her voice had lowered from a bark to a hissing whisper. “You’re late. You kept me waiting.” She drew even with the table in the entranceway. “I’m not used to being kept waiting.”

Al-Shalaan quickly set his attaché case on the table. Made from the finest Italian leather, it featured clasps in 24-carat gold. Not plating, but solid gold fixtures, right down to the tumblers on the combination locks. The Arabic power broker kept his voice contrite and his eyes down as he answered his mistress.

“I a-apologize, please, one thousand a-apologies,” he stuttered.

His English came with an Oxford accent. She was near enough now for him to smell her perfume, a timeless classic. In her heels she was taller than him. Her heavily lidded eyes glittered like diamonds. With her left hand she reached out and pressed a fingertip to his lips, causing him to fall instantly silent. The nail was long and sharp and red as blood in a Baghdad gutter.

“No more talking,” she warned.

She leaned in close so that her full lips were near his ear. Her breath was hot against the flesh of his face and he smelled the gin. He felt his crotch go tight and he shut his eyes, body trembling. Bellucci reached over with her hand and wrapped her long fingers around the leather haft of the riding crop.

“Strip!” she ordered.

She brought the riding crop down against the polished wood of the table with a sharp crack and al-Shalaan hastened to obey.

T HE ELEVATOR DOOR OPENED with a tasteful, muted ding and the four teammates of Phoenix Force looked down the hotel hallway. Encizo sagged, hanging off the shoulders of Hawkins and Manning, the bottle still clenched in his fist. The four bodyguards in front of al-Shalaan’s door turned their heads in unison. The choreography of the movement was particularly impressive given that none of them seemed to have necks.

From the back of the elevator James, in his overwatch position, whispered under his breath, “I should have used more drug.” He stood behind a hotel wheelchair they had acquisitioned from a bellhop in trade for a generous tip.

“There’re four of them,” Hawkins gritted as Encizo pretended to stumble. “This wasn’t supposed to be a fair fight. This isn’t the goddamn Ultimate Fighting Championship, it’s supposed to be an ambush.”

“Grin and bear it,” Manning said.

“Hey!” Encizo lifted his head and shouted at the bodyguards in carefully memorized French. He made his voice slurred and the liquor in his bottle splashed as he gestured. “What the hell are you fat pigs looking at?”

The crew moved down the hall. James, who had learned French while serving as a Navy SEAL, spoke up quickly. “Don’t mind my friend, he’s had too much to drink. You know?” He shoved the wheelchair away and off to one side, as if the group of drunks had stolen it then tired of playing with the item.

The four juggernauts did not reply. One of them placed his hand under his jacket in an automatic gesture. James, charged with overwatch, tensed. “Parlez-vous français?” he called out.

“Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?” Encizo said suddenly in his affected stupor.

“Oh, Jesus,” James moaned under his breath as he heard Encizo ask the bodyguards if they wanted to sleep with him tonight.

One of the bodyguards, a dark giant with a potato nose and a cell link in his right ear, snorted in laughter. He reached out a hand as large as a dinner plate and put a restraining hand on the guard who’d put his hand under his jacket. The big man muttered something, and the other three bodyguards laughed.

Manning could see the tension leak out of them, but the group remained vigilant as the four Stony Man commandos approached al-Shalaan’s suite door. In fact, he could see that they almost looked eager. Pummeling some of what they thought were drunk French tourists was an activity they seemed not averse to. This fit into the team’s plans perfectly. A brawl was fine. As long as the bodyguards didn’t feel the need to draw their handguns from the start, the odds would shift quickly into the team’s favor.

Phoenix Force moved down the hall, Encizo ranting in a slurred voice while Manning and Hawkins pretended to stagger under his weight. James began to drift out toward the edge of the group. Encizo started making gagging noises as if he were about to vomit.

The paneling on the walls of the long hotel hallway was of heavy wood, the pictures original eighteenth-century European cityscapes: Paris in autumn, London in the rain, Venice in the spring, Berlin at night. The carpet was thick, a burgundy laced with golden threaded patterns that matched the subdued wallpaper above the black walnut wainscoting. The resort was a beautiful, five-star hotel. In a detached way Gary Manning began to feel sorry for the grand old structure.

Phoenix Force had a tendency to wreak havoc.

As they approached the knot of the powerfully built, James rattled off a room number, addressing the bodyguards. “Where is it?” he demanded.

The dark giant, seemingly the senior guard, shook his head. “You’re not even on the right floor,” he snapped.

Encizo made a horrible retching sound and let a long line of saliva dribble out of his mouth and onto the carpet at the bodyguard’s feet. “He’s going to throw up!” James suddenly cried. Instinctively the four bodyguards stepped back, crowding them against the door.

Phoenix Force uncoiled. Gone was the comfortable banter. Gone was the easygoing camaraderie and tough-guy ball busting. No one was smiling. No one was laughing. The machine that was Phoenix Force had been initiated.

Manning stood closest to the guards, and he ducked out of Encizo’s arm, twisting at the waist. His right fist snapped out like a whip popping in a knife hand blow that struck the guard in the Adam’s apple while his left hand reached for the auto-injector positioned behind his back.

The bodyguard staggered, his hands flying up to protect his face in a boxer’s cover-up motion. Pulling the auto-injector free, Manning used his momentum to dip his massive shoulder and drive hard into the man’s body like linemen stopping a defensive back cold on the scrimmage line. The giant gasped as air was driven from his lungs and Manning’s shoulder hammered into his solar plexus. The man stumbled backward.

Instantly, Manning was on him, placing his leading forearm across the man’s neck and pinning him against the hotel wall. The man’s eyes grew wide with surprise, then quickly narrowed in effort as the bodyguard leader began to fight back. However, the pain from Manning’s initial neck blow had frightened and slowed the bodyguard’s reflexes so that his hook into the burly Phoenix Force warrior’s ribs was glancing and ineffective.

Manning brought up the auto-injector and shoved it roughly into the giant’s thick neck. The gun cycled and the sedative slammed into the man’s system. Manning wasn’t sure he’d hit the artery he was aiming for, but the muscles of the neck were extremely vascular. The bodyguard’s heart was now pumping wildly.

The man looked stunned, then panicked as he felt the air-jet of liquid medicine invade his body. He struggled to sit up, badly out of position, and Manning rammed an overhand elbow strike into his unprotected face, driving him into the floor.

James attacked simultaneously with Manning. He leaped forward and threw his right forearm hard into the throat of the bodyguard with a French Foreign Legion tattoo on his neck while his right leg simultaneously hooked behind the man’s ankle. As the bodyguard tumbled back against the wall, James fisted the auto-injector and thrust it forward.

He was aiming for the neck as Manning had, but the ex-Legionnaire twisted at the last moment so that the muzzle of the auto-injector struck him in the corner of his face, back toward the ear where the mandible hinge joint attached to the skull.

The man gaped in surprise, then almost instantly lost control of his jaw. The muscles of his face went slack even as James pulled back. He saw the bodyguard’s hand come up, slap ineffectually at the lapel of his blazer even as he finished sliding down the wall to the carpet in front of al-Shalaan’s door. James spun, auto-injector in one hand while he reached for his silenced pistol in case events were unfolding in a dangerous way.

He saw Encizo hammering a much taller man with huge, looping hooks, his knuckles smashing into the sides of the man’s face with rapacious energy. The bottle of liquor had bounced as it had been dropped and rolled away, spilling alcohol on the expensive carpet. Encizo stepped forward and grabbed the stunned man’s suit jacket by the lapels and shoved them down to his elbows, effectively pinning them to his sides in a hockey maneuver.

Encizo ripped his auto-injector free as the fingers of his other hand wrapped tightly into the close-knit curls of his target’s hair. He jerked once, swiveling from the hips, and the screaming man took a nosedive into the puddle of liquor soaking into the carpet.

The little Cuban dropped in a knee-led pile driver that slammed into the man’s back between his shoulder blades, pinning him to the floor. The auto-injector made contact with the easy target of the man’s pulsing carotid artery and he activated the device.

Encizo kept his weight pressing down on the prone bodyguard, crushing him into the carpet until the surgical anesthesia took effect. He felt the man’s struggles suddenly turn sluggish and then stop. The huge body in his grip went noodle-limp.

Hawkins had known from the beginning that when Phoenix Force unleashed its close-quarters ambush that of all the men in the phalanx, he would have the farthest distance to cover to initiate his attack. It was a distance of only two or three yards. But with an alert and possibly well-trained enemy, that scant distance would give his target a valuable couple of seconds of reaction time that the other bodyguards wouldn’t have.

If the man was competent, then Hawkins knew he could find himself in a stand-up fight instead of a surreptitious attack. When McCarter had set up the action plan, Hawkins had kept his face impassive as he listened to his assignment. Inside he had felt a sense of pride as he realized he had been given the position David McCarter would have taken for himself had his driving skills not been so imperative to the second phase of the operation.

As James drifted out around Manning’s broad form, signaling the start of assault, Hawkins sprang into action. He stepped forward from under Encizo’s arm and toward his man.

The bodyguard’s eyes grew wide in surprise, identically to those of his leader. Hawkins crossed the two endless steps between them as the rest of Phoenix Force clashed with the team of bodyguards. He felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach as he realized he might not make it. He went up on the toes of his left foot as he pulled his right knee back and up, almost to the level of his chin. His momentum carried him forward, and his leg lashed out as the black plastic alloy of the bodyguard’s Glock 19 was pulled clear of shoulder leather.

The heel of Hawkins’s low-cut boot slammed into the bodyguard’s sternum, and Hawkins felt the jar of the impact shock travel up his leg like the vibration of a tuning fork. He heard the bodyguard grunt as he continued moving forward, driving his foot down from the impact zone.

Hawkins had missed his specific target of the forearm attached to the hand holding the Glock pistol. He had made a mistake. As his right foot drove through the kick attack and landed on the carpet, the Phoenix Force commando was already following through on his first strike. He clamped his hand around the wrist holding the pistol as he whipped his right elbow around in an overhead crescent strike.

The point of his elbow smashed into the man’s face just below his eye and the bodyguard’s head snapped back into the wall, but the man didn’t go out. Hawkins dug inside himself and brought forth the aggression and anger and will that had served him for so long in such life-and-death struggles.

The bodyguard jerked his arm back, trying to clear the pistol for a shot. Hawkins squeezed hard, stymieing the movement the way an NBA guard stuffs a dunk attempt. The muzzle of the gun dug into the bodyguard’s stomach, keeping the man from pulling the trigger.

The man grunted, then forced his hand up, and Hawkins had to face the bitter truth that the man was stronger than he was. Millimeter by millimeter the gun began to move. Hawkins snarled then, and cold, greasy shots of adrenaline splashed into his knotted stomach.

Goose bumps rose on his flesh as fear-energy coursed through his system. In the blink of an eye he felt energized, supercharged.

His fingers crushed the man’s wrist. His elbow began to rise and fall with jackhammer rhythm, each impact of the sharp bone sending shock waves through the bodyguard’s head to rap his brain against the side of his skull. Hawkins’s strikes tore flesh open across the man’s forehead near the temples and blood gushed in sudden torrents.

The man went limp and the pistol fell from slack fingers. Hawkins rose, pulled his auto-injector free and shot it into the unconscious man’s neck.

He turned and saw the rest of Phoenix Force looking at him.

“What?” he asked, catching his breath.

“Nothing,” Manning said with a shrug. “If you’re through playing with your food, do you think we could continue?”

“Sure, no problem.”

“Next time I’m not going to give you a fancy toy if you’re not going to use it right,” James said.

“Fuck ’em,” Hawkins replied. “They work for scum. They’re lucky the powers that be didn’t want corpses on friendly soil.”

“Let’s roll,” Manning said.

CHAPTER FIVE

From his overwatch position Gadgets Schwarz saw Rosario Blancanales fall. He saw the incongruous figure of a schoolgirl stumble back, a bloody knife in her fist. He shifted the shortened muzzle of his Steyr AUG A3 toward the female as she stabbed Blancanales a second time.

The aiming reticle of his 1.5X power telescope filled with the young woman’s figure as she swept her knife up. She staggered in his sight as he attempted to put a 5.56 mm Teflon-coated round through the left side of her rib cage.

But the close-quarters battle exploded into a frenzy of activity as one of the Zetas gunslingers recovered his composure on Carl Lyons’s flank and stepped into Schwarz’s line of fire. The man raised a Browning Hi-Power pistol and triggered a round into the Able Team leader’s back that was soaked up by his Kevlar body armor.

Lyons staggered under the impact as Schwarz put the man down. The Able Team leader triggered his assault shotgun, and suddenly the warehouse echoed with the sound of the full automatic 12-gauge weapon.

Bodies spun and were flung like rag dolls from the impact of .440 stainless-steel fléchettes that ripped through flesh and shredded internal organs. Blood and brain and bits of bone struck the corrugated walls of the old warehouse, and the metal structure rang as rounds punched through it.

Then there was silence.

From his position at the window Schwarz shifted his Steyr AUG, scanning the area. Nothing moved. He snapped the barrel to a different vector and found all still.

Carl Lyons stood at the point of the unit’s triangle formation, his smoking shotgun pointed downward, his ears ringing from the booming of his own weapon.

For a second he couldn’t understand Schwarz’s frantic shouting, then his hearing returned well enough for him to make out what his teammate was hollering. Lyons spun, searching the floor for Blancanales.

He saw the unconscious Latino sprawled out, one hand still clutching his weapon, the other resting on an ugly mess of a wound leaking blood across his lap. Schwarz burst through the door and began checking Zetas bodies as Lyons made his way through the carnage toward his downed friend.

Blancanales’s breathing was shallow and forced, his color obviously bad, even in the uncertain light. Blancanales himself often served as Able Team’s field medic, so it was from his kit that Carl Lyons stripped the first-aid equipment.

He set down his shotgun and brought a soft, OD green plastic package to his teeth and ripped it open. He moved Blancanales’s hand to the side and spilled the contents of the packet on his open wound. Instantly the coagulation powder went to work, clotting the blood around the puncture wounds.

Since Blancanales’s breathing was uncompromised, if laborious, and there was no other obvious wound, Lyons dedicated his attention to that injury first. Behind him Schwarz kept his weapon in one hand and used his other to call in the team’s helicopter.

“Help us,” moaned one of the hanging prisoners.

“Shut up,” Lyons snapped.

He finished securing a second pressure dressing over Blancanales’s wound. The Latino’s eyes fluttered open, glazed with pain, and Lyons could see the man struggle toward coherency through the force of sheer willpower.

“We good?” Blancanales asked.

“Yeah,” Lyons answered softly. “Jack’s coming. We’ll have you medevaced in no time. I hear the chopper now.”

“The girl?”

“She’s out, buddy. You’re lucky you’re still spry for such an old fart.”

“Screw you,” Blancanales said. His teeth were gritted through the pain. “Help me stand.”

“Negative,” Lyons said. “You’re bleeding internally. You try to walk, and you’ll rip your guts open.”

The big ex-cop put a heavy hand on Blancanales’s chest, keeping the stubborn man down. As he did so, he noticed the man’s abdomen pushing out and becoming rigid right before his eyes. The internal bleeding was bad, Lyons realized, rapidly filling the spaces between his internal organs inside his torso. The clock was ticking on the wounded man.

Blancanales winced as he sank back down and Lyons pulled a loaded morphine syringe from Blancanales’s medic kit. As he prepped the needle, he called over his shoulder at the third member of the team. Outside he could hear the sound of Jack Grimaldi’s chopper.

“How we doing?” Lyons asked.

“Good,” Schwarz answered. Having made sure all the hostile personnel were down, he walked over to the hanging men. One of them was a dripping corpse. Brains clung to the dead man’s shirt and blood spilled freely down his body from the gaping hole in his head, creating a growing puddle at his feet.

“Who knows Hart?” Schwarz asked the remaining two prisoners, using the CIA case officer’s pseudonym. “Come on, who knows Hart? I hope to Christ it wasn’t this guy.” The Able Team commando gestured toward the corpse.

Gonzales turned his head. “Bellicose Dawn,” he muttered. He felt exhausted, dried out like a piece of fruit turned to leather in the sun. “Hart wanted to know about Bellicose Dawn.”

“Let’s get you out of here,” Schwarz said.

While Lyons gave Blancanales a shot to help him manage the overwhelming pain, Schwarz began undoing the manacles locked around Gonzales’s wrists. The informant sagged onto his feet, fighting back tears of relief. He stripped off his sweat-and blood-soaked shirt and tucked it into his pants to cover himself. He felt a sudden urge to spit on the bodies of Lagos and the unconscious Marta, but restrained himself. A distracted part of his mind cataloged the vivid, ugly scar on Lagos’s throat.

“Don’t get bashful now,” Schwarz warned. “I got a hurt brother, and you’re coming out to help me get one of the stretcher benches attached to my chopper.”

“My family—” Gonzales began.

“Covered,” Schwarz cut him off. “Your boy Hart already arranged that. Now let’s move.”

“What about me!” the last prisoner demanded, his voice frantic.

“Don’t worry. You’ll only be hanging a few more minutes. We’ll call the locals and tell them they have a cleanup on aisle ten. You’ll be fine.”

“You can’t leave me hanging here!” the man cried.

“People judge you by the company you keep, asshole,” Schwarz snapped. “Now shut up or I’ll leave you like your friend. At least he’s quiet.”

The bluff worked and the man fell silent.

In minutes the wounded Blancanales was loaded onto the stretcher and then the Little Bird as Carl Lyons coordinated with Stony Man control on local response and emergency medical treatment for the wounded Able Team operator.

Gonzales was loaded onto the helicopter, and the Little Bird lifted off as the first units of the NOPD were making their way to the scene. The incident would remain an official mystery with its own PR story for the press.

The lid was off Bellicose Dawn.

CHAPTER SIX

Gary Manning used his key card override on the door. The electronic indicator light flashed red, then amber, then green. The automatic lock snapped back with an audible click, and he turned the lever handle. The door swung open under his touch then stopped as the chain caught.

Manning growled like a bear and put his shoulder to the door. The chain popped loose with a sharp sound and the door flew open. Hawkins rushed in, his silenced pistol up and ready.

He used the weight of his body to keep the door to the hotel room open as Encizo rushed into the room hard on his heels. Manning followed.

Phoenix Force stopped and stared.

Her rubber dress pushed up above her thighs, Bellucci straddled the nude al-Shalaan like a cowgirl on her pony. In one hand she held the end of a corded rope fashioned into a choker around the Arab powerbroker’s neck. With her other she used a riding crop to urge the hopping man into continued motion. From the welts and livid red marks on the man’s buttocks the dominatrix had not been shy about using the whip.

With each buck Bellucci hopped, causing her augmented breasts to bounce wildly. Al-Shalaan was barking something as the woman struck him. Phoenix Force’s dynamic entry caused the pair to snap their heads around in shock.

Bellucci screamed as she saw the men rush in. Al-Shalaan threw himself straight to the floor, squeezing his eyes shut against the vision of four sound suppressors bearing down on him.

Manning blinked, stunned by the incredulous imagery before him, then training took over and put his conscious mind in the passenger seat.

“Freeze!” he shouted in French. Then added, “Secure the room.”

Hawkins and Encizo immediately stood and pushed deeper into the suite, methodically clearing the room as James rushed toward the intertwined sex partners under the unwavering cover of Manning’s pistol.

“Don’t shoot!” the woman shrieked in terror, using French as Manning had.

“Stay down!” James snapped, and shoved her clear of al-Shalaan.

The featherweight woman tumbled off her partner’s back and slid across the marble tile of the floor. Her riding crop went spinning away. She curled into a terrified ball. James slid his pistol back into its shoulder holster and reached down with his free hand to snatch the loose end of the rope wound around al-Shalaan’s neck.

He jerked the man to his feet, pulled the auto-injector clear and jabbed it into the side of the terrorist facilitator’s neck. A second dose went straight into the man’s bloodstream. James shoved the man against the wall and let him slide to the ground.

“You want to dose the woman?” he asked Manning.

“Clear!” Encizo and Hawkins called in French from deeper inside the room.

“Yeah,” Manning answered.

The Canadian holstered his pistol as Encizo and Hawkins came back into the entranceway. Drawing his auto-injector, he moved toward the cowering prostitute. She tried to scramble away from him, but he was too quick and too strong for her. He pinned her against the bar. Her arm swung desperately, knocking a tumbler of ice and gin to the ground where it exploded into glass shards with a pop like a gunshot.

“I’m sorry, this won’t hurt,” Manning said in French, finding manhandling the woman a distasteful task.

Mission first.

He leaned his weight against her body and applied the auto-injector into the soft, smooth flesh of her neck. The woman’s heart was racing in terror, and the drug affected her almost instantaneously. He lowered her to the floor, avoiding the spilled liquor and broken glass.

Manning rose and surveyed the scene. James was using a tactical folding knife to cut the ropes from around the neck of the unconscious al-Shalaan. Hawkins was quickly shoving the Saudi prince’s attaché case, cell phone and laptop into a black nylon gym bag. Coming across the man’s suit jacket lying on the floor, the Southerner lifted the man’s leather wallet from the inside pocket and threw that in, as well.

Encizo was at the open door, scanning the hallway for witnesses and bystanders while covering the slumped bodies of the guards. He had collected guns from every man and dropped them inside a waist-high ceramic vase set beside the entrance to the room. Manning was satisfied that the operation was unfolding as smoothly as could be expected.

“We’ve picked up our uncle and we’re coming home,” he said into his throat mike.

“Copy,” McCarter and Price echoed.

“Get the wheelchair,” Manning said to Encizo.

Encizo disappeared around the edge of the door as he darted down the hall. Manning turned and crossed the room’s foyer to help James hoist al-Shalaan’s limp body off the floor. Behind them Hawkins had methodically made his way around to the woman’s purse, dumping the contents out onto the bar.

He let out a long low whistle as he shifted through the mess. “Jeez, how much drugs does this woman have?” He shook his head as he pulled up the menu on her phone and read some numbers, quickly scanning for prefixes that might be important. “Nothing.”

“You got everything?” Manning asked.

“Yeah. All we have time for. I haven’t found the room safe, but it wasn’t on our op plan anyway.”

“Let’s go,” James said.

Encizo came back into the room, pushing the wheelchair ahead of him. Without preamble James and Manning slung the unconscious body of al-Shalaan into the seat. The big Canadian stacked the man’s loose clothing on his naked lap. This was a discreet hotel. If a VIP was being escorted dead drunk and naked to a waiting car by his entourage, then it was best not to make the situation hotel business.

Phoenix Force moved out of the room and passed the sprawled bodies of al-Shalaan’s guards. They turned down the hallway opposite the elevator bank. They moved quickly in a quintessential VIP protection pattern.

“Let’s go, guys,” McCarter said in the earjack. “The valet is giving me grief.”

“Pay him off, we don’t need the heat. The package is naked.”

“Whose fault is that? Just hurry. This fussy little man out here has numbered days if he blows that goddamn whistle at me one more time,” the ex-SAS commando said.

“I believe him. We’d better get moving,” Manning said.

“It’s nice to know cooler heads prevail,” James muttered.

Phoenix Force reached the end of the hall and opened a door set off to the right of the stair access entrance. They stepped into an Employees Only area where the hotel maids kept their cleaning carts and the bellhops cached folding trays for room service. A freight elevator stood to one side of the long, narrow staging area.

They moved quickly to the elevator, and Manning pulled a firefighter override key from his pocket and called the lift straight to the floor.

The elevator door opened with a pneumatic hiss and Encizo pushed the wheelchair inside.

McCarter’s voice came over the com link. “I’ve got sirens.”

“Copy,” Manning said. “We’re headed to the lobby now.”

The doors sealed shut and the elevator jerked as it started its descent. The inside of the freight elevator was deep and wide, big enough for a small forklift to fit into. The walls were dented and painted a flat, institutional white above metal plating that ran about halfway up the sides. It smelled like cleaning products.

McCarter spoke into the com link. “I’m moving to Route Bravo. The first gendarme has arrived.”

“Copy,” Manning acknowledged.

The elevator slowed, then halted and the door slid open. A rail-thin bellhop with slicked-back hair looked up in surprise.

Manning stepped forward in the manner of an arrogant bodyguard and brushed past the man. “Move!” he snapped in German.

Behind him Phoenix Force rolled out of the elevator and began to navigate the warren of halls behind the hotel’s lobby, heading toward the loading docks. They caught some stares from janitors and building workers, but no one said a word to the hard-eyed men.

They hit the back dock moving briskly. As if taking a cue from some off-scene director, McCarter pulled up into the loading bay. He was driving the stretch Hummer as part of the cover, right down to the chauffeur’s uniform. He locked up the independent disc brakes and jerked the heavy vehicle to a stop. Manning heard the sound of the automatic locks disengaging and quickly jerked open the back door on the big vehicle.

Hawkins and Encizo put their hands under al-Shalaan’s arms and catapulted him out of the wheelchair as James pulled it away, thrusting him through the open limo door. There was a shout from behind them, but the team ignored it as they leaped after the unconscious man and into the vehicle.

McCarter slammed his foot to the gas pedal before Manning had time to pull the door closed behind him and the big vehicle hurtled out of the loading dock and onto a side street.

“What’d you do?” McCarter demanded.

A Fiat suddenly appeared in front of him and he jerked the stretch Hummer into the other lane to avoid a rear-end collision.

In the back, the Phoenix Force commandos rolled up against the side of the vehicle with the sudden sharp swerve. They struggled to get the unconscious Saudi into a seat and a safety belt around him. James managed to click the buckle just before McCarter slammed on the brakes.

James was thrown backward, bouncing off the granite mass of Manning and landing on top of Encizo. The men scrambled to fit themselves into seat belts as McCarter slalomed the gigantic stretch Hummer in and out of traffic.

“This is bollocksed!” McCarter snarled to no one in particular.

“Let’s just get to the jetty!” James called back. “It’ll take them a while to shift the pursuit to the water. By that time we’ll have scuttled the boat and be gone.”

“That’s what I’m doing, mate,” McCarter agreed.

He tapped his brakes, snapped the steering wheel to the left, gunned the gas and zoomed past a black four-door sedan, then he cut the wheel back to the right. Behind him a single siren and flashing light bar became three.

Hawkins crawled over the barrier between the backseat and the driver compartment through the open glass divider. He swung down, twisted and slid into the shotgun seat. McCarter darted around a heavy diesel truck stacked with crates and the motion threw the former U.S. army commando up against the passenger door. Hawkins snatched hold of the handle above the window to steady himself.

“Let’s use the improved clearance on this thing,” Hawkins said. “Cut through something, drive over something. Those patrol cars are low-slung.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Hawkins looked at the NSA field version of the vehicle’s navigation device and watched their GPS coordinates speeding through the map display of the French city. He saw a series of switchback turns coming up on the road ahead toward the team’s exfiltration point.

McCarter burned through an intersection against the light. Horns blared in sudden panic, and the Hummer rocked on its suspension like a boxer avoiding jabs. They crested a rise and through a break in the buildings, and the Briton could see empty black under a dark sky. Behind them a police cruiser gunned forward and tried to pull parallel. McCarter swerved to cut him off and bullied the cop back with the superior weight of the stretch Hummer.

“Up ahead. Take that alley,” Hawkins barked, “drive across the parking lot and down the hill. There’s no way the cops’ll follow us in their cars. It’ll buy us minutes as they try to navigate the switchbacks down to the shore.”

“That’s crazy!” McCarter shouted. “We’ll flip for sure.” He jerked the wheel in a tight, 180-degree spin then let it flip back around. “Hold on!”

The Briton reached down and flipped off the all-wheel drive, switching the custom setting to front-wheel control. He tapped the brakes and the rear wheels of the Hummer locked up, screaming in protest as McCarter just managed to slide the rear end around.

The knobby front tires of the sliding vehicle clawed at the asphalt. They met the curb of the sidewalk and bucked up into the air. The rear wheels caught hold and as the front of the Hummer bounced back down McCarter snapped the vehicle back into all-wheel drive.

“Who dares wins,” McCarter gritted.

T HEY SPED INTO THE NARROW alley Hawkins had indicated. The former SAS commando struck a pair of garbage cans with the stretch Hummer’s heavy bumper. They bounced up into the air, spilling trash across the windshield, then bounced off the hood and flipped up over the vehicle’s roof. McCarter snapped the wheel to avoid a larger, industrial-size green garbage bin and scraped the wall of the alley. There was a shower of sparks, then the screaming of metal peeling away from metal as his sideview mirror was snapped off.

“Oh, we’re having fun now,” Hawkins said.

The stretch Hummer rocketed out of the narrow alley and shot across the street. McCarter lay on the horn as he cut across two lanes of traffic. A forest-green Audi locked its brakes as the Hummer suddenly loomed in front of it. The little coupe turned sideways, its rear end fishtailing.

The Hummer’s front wheels struck the edge of the sidewalk and bounced up again. McCarter wrestled the massive vehicle over a parking divider, uprooting a sapling as he did so. He weaved in and out of sitting vehicles as he crossed the parking lot. A middle-aged couple in evening dress appeared at the edge of his headlights.

The woman screamed and the man had the presence of mind to jerk back. McCarter turned his wheel, kissed the side of a parked Fiat and shot past the terrified couple.

“Sorry!” he yelled, knowing they couldn’t hear him. He glanced at his sideview mirror to see how close the pursuing patrol cars were, and then remembered he’d ripped the driver-side mirror clean off the body frame. His eyes darted to the passenger-side mirror. He saw spinning lights emerging from the alley across the street.

He turned his gaze forward again. A thick hedge of arborvitaes formed a wall at the rear of the parking lot. He cut his eyes toward Hawkins, then back toward the wall of foliage. He never slowed.

The bucking of the vehicle as it hit the curb rattled their teeth hard. Then the heavy bumper struck the arborvitaes like a battering ram and the Hummer slammed through and out the other side.

For a second McCarter couldn’t see anything but the rubbery, fanlike needled leaves. The Hummer hurtled through a shoulder-high fence of 4x4 planks and turned them into splintered kindling.

Then there was nothing.

The Hummer hovered for a moment out into open space and Hawkins had an absurd, momentary flashback to his childhood and the television show The Dukes of Hazard. The Hummer tilted as they hovered and they could see the lights of the city plunging down the steep hill below them.

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