Deadly Payload

“Just women and children,” Schwarz said. “Killed to smear America’s name across the headlines in innocent blood.”

Lyons shrugged. “The papers are already full of the U.S. being bloodthirsty brutes for Iraq. Like we needed any more vilification?”

Blancanales cocked an eyebrow.

“Sorry,” Lyons said. “That last caveman comment got me breaking out my five-dollar words.”

Blancanales grinned, but the smile didn’t last long. “But why UAVs?”

“It has to be linked to the mess Phoenix is investigating over in Lebanon,” Schwarz said. “And don’t forget, we’ve had our own encounters with rogue drones in the past.”

“The Farm never did figure out who supplied that Egyptian general with so many Predators,” Blancanales answered. “This might be more of the same.”

Lyons frowned, “Then we can find out who’s behind it and shut it all down.”

“Before they start a global war,” Schwarz mentioned. He looked at the files on the attack. “We just need to figure out where the drones launched from. Maybe then we could learn who made them and work our way up the food chain.”

He pored over detailed photographs of the wrecked unmanned drones that had hit the crowd at the consulate. Nothing identifiable had survived the crash of the second, and the AT-4 rocket had blasted everything to garbage.

“Nothing on the technology front?” Blancanales asked.

“Bulk, cheap Chinese electronics, rewired to handle the demands of duplicating Predator UAV technology. Some brilliant improvisation, but no evidence of who put it together,” Schwarz said. He shook his head. “Untraceable.”

“Nothing is untraceable,” Lyons retorted. “We’ll find a handle. And when we do, we’ll twist until we get some answers.”

There was a knock at the door and all three Able warriors’ hands fell to the grips of their holstered handguns. Lyons answered the door and admitted their contact, Susana Arquillo. She was a CIA field agent assigned to Panama. Her skin was darkened and bronzed by the near equatorial sun. Her hair had been long and dark in her file photograph, but in person, it was trimmed short and pulled back into a tight bun. A few strands of white feathered through it to make it seem lighter. Arquillo’s full, lush lips parted in a smile.

“Carl Ryder?” she asked.

“That’s me,” Lyons said.

“And you can confirm who I am?” Arquillo asked.

“Gadgets, run her prints,” Lyons told Schwarz. “If you’re not who you’re supposed to be…”

Arquillo’s eyes dropped to the rubber Pachmayer grips poking out of Lyons’s waistband. “I won’t be walking out of here. But what if I’m packing explosives?”

Lyons looked her over, hard blue eyes scanning the way her jeans hugged her curvaceous hips. Her blouse hung, unbuttoned and tied together at the bottom, a dark red tank top constraining her full breasts. His hand patted around her waist and found her compact 9 mm Glock on one side and a tiny .38 Special tucked away on the other. “I don’t think you could be hiding too much under there.”

Arquillo was relatively tall, five foot nine, and athletically built. She cocked an eyebrow as she pressed her fingertips to the flat scan plate Schwarz held out for her. “Ever hear of a charger?”

“You don’t strike me as the kind of woman who’d want to go out with an eighth of a stick of C-4 detonating in her ass,” Lyons said.

“Besides,” Blancanales added, holding up a portable “sniffer.” “This thing would have smelled explosive residue on you.”

“Thorough,” Arquillo noted.

“She’s clean,” Schwarz declared.

CHAPTER TWO

Gary Manning observed the unknown group on the beach, ignoring the salt drying and congealing with sand in his soaked BDUs. There would be time to change into fresh clothing later, and it was a minor discomfort. The group’s activity was clearer now from their position on the beach. It was a work crew, unloading containers from transport trucks onto a beached barge. His lips drew into a tight line.

“Unmarked containers,” he said. “But the shape is unmistakable.”

“UAV transport crating,” David McCarter answered as he lowered his binoculars. “We lucked out here.”

“Except, if we were lucky, we would have a Zodiac raft to shadow the barge to its destination,” Manning said.

“I’ll contact the Farm,” McCarter suggested. “It’ll be a breach of radio discipline, but they can keep an eye on the craft while we continue our inland push.”

“We’re still going into Lebanon?” Hawkins asked.

“These things were delivered somewhere. And we still have to touch base with Unit 777 and the Mossad. They’ve been noticing some unusual activity in Lebanon.”

“UFO sightings,” Calvin James muttered. “If they weren’t one of the crack units in the region, I’d have thought they’d gone nuts.”

“Unidentified aircraft aren’t always spawned by little green men, hermano ,” Rafael Encizo chided his partner. “And some of those UFOs might have dropped chemical weapons into Syria. I’d still like to keep a tail on them.”

McCarter lowered the satellite radio. “Barb has a Keyhole watching the barge. The Farm isn’t going to lose track of it.”

James nodded. “Which means we can concentrate on keeping up with the trucks.”

“Not necessarily,” Manning interjected. McCarter and James regarded their partner quizzically as the brawny Canadian observed the convoy through his sniper scope. “The trucks aren’t moving.”

McCarter ran a mental tally of the enemy vehicles. There were three tractor-trailer combinations and half a dozen pickup trucks. The pickups had six men a piece, and who knew how many crewed the eighteen-wheelers, but the Phoenix Force commander figured between forty and fifty men for this operation. The rules of engagement for this mission had nominally been to avoid enemy contact, and any unavoidable conflict had to be undertaken with a maximum of stealth. Five against fifty was not going to be a silent struggle, no matter if all of their weapons had been suppressed. The element of surprise only went so far.

“Even more bad news,” Encizo noted as he lowered his scope-equipped MP-5. “That barge didn’t go more than five hundred yards out into the water.”

McCarter glanced back, then watched the trailers. He swept them with his binoculars, eschewing optics for his machine pistol. He lowered them. “They set up a transmission antenna.”

James looked out toward the barge. “We only saw them unload one of the trailers onto the barge, with workers who had come out of the back of a second.”

“The third is a control center,” Hawkins said. He took a deep breath and lifted his binoculars to watch the barge along with James and Encizo. “It’s parked?”

“Looks like they’re setting up to launch the UAVs,” James noted.

“Get on the horn to the Farm,” McCarter said. “We’ve got a major emergency. Rafe, Cal. Time to hit the water.”

Encizo grimaced. “Both of us?”

“I appreciate the offer, but that barge has to be put down before they can launch,” McCarter ordered.

Hawkins looked up from his satellite phone. “Got the Farm.”

“Barb?” McCarter asked.

“What is it, David?” Barbara Price asked.