Doom Prophecy

“Is this HedSpayce?” the dwarf asked.

“Uh, yeah,” Cash answered. She looked past the dwarf and the giant, seeing a lanky, long-haired man with a handlebar mustache standing in the hall. He looked as if he were made out of toothpicks, he was so skinny. His eyes were black, and creepy. They had dollies, loaded with stacks of boxes of paper, diskettes and other office supplies. These weren’t their usual deliverymen, even though they wore the right uniforms and their boxes were stamped with the right return labels.

She just didn’t know. The mammoth delivery man looked too mean, too cruel, to be anything other than a professional wrestler, or worse, a serial killer. The giant somehow managed to squeeze his wide shoulders through the doorjamb and rolled his dolly toward the center of the office.

“Where do we drop this off?” the little one asked. Cash looked down at him as he pushed his cart in.

“Oh, the supply room is this way,” she said as he handed her the clipboard.

The clipboard was one of those digital delivery invoices, with a stylus to sign your name on a pressure-sensitive LED screen. HedSpayce’s office address was displayed on another little screen at the top of the brown unit. She signed her name and started to hand the clipboard back to the dwarf when something snaked around her throat.

It was an arm, the wiry thin limb of the creepy, long-haired delivery man. Suddenly, that toothpick-thin body was a lot stronger than she thought, corded muscles squeezing her throat and picking her up off the ground. Her feet kicked and she tried to let out a choked scream.

Nothing got past that strong, muscular forearm.

Henley, a handsome young black kid, rose, shouting at the man strangling her. The giant turned swiftly and wrapped his massive hands around Henley’s head and yanked him off his feet, snapping his body around and hurling him through a bank of cubicles. As the young hacker’s body crashed through the offices, screams of confusion filled the air.

Cash struggled, her fingers trying to dig into the forearm of the killer strangling her, but the cords of his muscles were too tight. It was like squeezing steel. His other arm snaked around and he aimed a long-barreled handgun at another of her friends, a pretty young woman named Claudia, and peppered her white blouse with bloody splotches. Claudia’s corpse dropped to the floor, and the HedSpayce executive forced a screech past her constricted larynx. She reached out to claw at his gun hand, but his arm was too long for her to grab the pistol.

The snakelike gunman twisted and put more shots into the head of Hideo, another of her co-workers, as he ran to her rescue. Tears burned in her eyes as she watched another of her friends collapse into a lifeless heap at her feet. Cash couldn’t speak, and her lungs strained for a fresh breath of air.

Everyone else was running now, but the giant ripped apart two boxes and pulled out two big, barrellike weapons. Thundering booms filled the room, and cubicle walls suddenly sprouted softball-size holes. More hackers and office workers tried to scramble for safety, but the giant’s weapons smashed the same massive channels through their chests and heads.

It was a massacre.

The dwarf had gotten another weapon out of a box. It looked like a water bottle with handles, a belt trailing from the side of it. However, it spit flames from the muzzle that sliced through the office. Computers burst apart in sprays of sparks and chips. Cash’s co-workers also burst open as the high-velocity slugs hammered into them.

The woman’s struggles weakened. She mouthed a desperate plea, then remembered the cell phone in her pocket. Maybe if she hit 9-1-1…

Jacob “The Snake” Cannon lowered his modified CZ-75 as he felt Amanda Cash slump in his arms. “She’s gone.”

“Took your time about it,” Linn “Gremlin” Keller snarled, slipping his personally designed belt-fed Ripper XM-1 back into its box. Keller was a brilliant weapons designer and had produced a full-powered machine gun that he could fire without being knocked off balance by the recoil. “You just love having the girls struggle, don’t you?”

Cannon smirked. “I’m part snake, Gremlin. You know we like to feel the last wiggles of our prey.”

He licked Cash’s earlobe, then let her slip to the floor in a puddle of long red hair and tangled limbs. “Haggar!”

The gigantic David Lee “Mammoth” Haggar stopped clomping through the wreckage of the cubicles and looked back to his partners.

“You know, while you two are talking,” Haggar answered in a deep baritone, “there might be survivors dialing for the cops.”

The giant stopped and triggered one of his custom-designed Striker 12 shotgun pistols into the body of a downed office worker. Keller had shortened the barrels on the 12-shot, rotary drum shotguns specifically to give the titanic assassin a weapon that he felt comfortable with. An oversize trigger guard and grips for his big hands completed the fitting of tool to user.

“Right. Spread out,” Keller said. “We won’t have much time to make sure of a clean sweep, not after the racket we raised.”

“If the cops come, we’ll take care of them,” Cannon responded, his cruel mouth twisting into a hideous smile.

Keller sighed, threw Haggar a bandolier of shotgun shells, then began reloading his Ripper. Cannon chuckled. Even though Keller hated to kill more people than they were hired to, there was a glint of joy as the malevolent, miniature weapons designer fed a new belt into his crowd-killing device.

Sure enough, the San Francisco Police Department showed up as they reached the entrance of the office building.

Of course, Cannon thought later. He slipped into the back of their delivery van and looked at the burning police cars and slaughtered officers slumped in the street—they never stood a chance.

CHAPTER TWO

David McCarter had a strong stomach, but when the horde of bloodred monstrosities fell upon the captive Special Forces soldiers, the Briton had to look away and shake his head. In the SAS, he’d seen countless atrocities committed against captured soldiers and policemen, and as a member and leader of Phoenix Force, he’d been at ground zero to several more. Every time he saw them, revulsion steeled him to fight harder against the madmen who sought to turn the world into their charnel house.

At the other end of the War Room table, a massive fist smashed down hard. Carl “Ironman” Lyons, Able Team’s commander, had given in to his anger.

“That’s what you’ll be going up against, David,” Hal Brognola affirmed, ignoring Lyons’s outburst.

“Africa,” McCarter said. He looked at his mission plan. “Well, I’d like to at least have Calvin with me on this.”

Brognola glanced over to Calvin James. He was a tall, lanky black man, one of the first replacement members of Phoenix Force and their first American teammate. “I wish I could keep Phoenix Force together, but we don’t have enough manpower to keep the teams intact and handle what we think are the three hot spots in the AJAX hunt.”

McCarter sighed. “We can’t call Mack in on this?”

Brognola shook his head. “He’s gone hunting. He’ll be back when he can, but I want AJAX stopped immediately.”

McCarter sighed. “All right. Phoenix has split up before to take on missions. But once you find the gobs who’ve been snuffing those State Department boys…”

“We’ll be right on the first flight to the Sudan,” James answered.

McCarter winked at his longtime teammate. “Don’t make me have to bail you out, Cal.”

Rafael Encizo spoke up. “We’ve got Japan nailed down.” The stocky Cuban’s swarthy face split with a wide smile. He glanced over to James, who looked troubled. “You okay, amigo?”

“I just wish I could be in three places at once,” James said. “I hate leaving David in Africa without a brother to back him up. And Able Team’s going to San Francisco where a lot of cops were killed by the creeps who wiped out HedSpayce.”

McCarter frowned. When he first met Calvin James, he was a member of the San Francisco SWAT team. The ex-Navy SEAL had left behind the streets of Chicago where too many of his family had been lost to heroin and its abusers. Still, even after leaving the military, James wanted to do something to see that no one else suffered like his sister and mother. Putting on a badge was James’s first step in that crusade, but soon the ex-SEAL was called to join another war, taking the place of the fallen Keio Ohara. James still kept ties with the San Francisco police department, and helped vet blacksuits for Buck Greene from that department. McCarter had lost enough friends and partners to know how much James wanted to be part of the team that got even for the slaughter of his fellow lawmen.

“Cal, look at that ugly brute that just dented the table,” McCarter said. Rosario Blancanales and Hermann Schwarz, Lyons’s partners on Able Team, chuckled at the Briton’s description of their friend.

James looked at Lyons out of the corner of his eye. He made a face. “Do I have to?”

“Kin-A you have to.” Lyons grunted, slipping into caveman mode.

James looked over, and McCarter continued. “I know you want to do mean, nasty things to those cop killers and freaks who murdered twenty unarmed office workers. I know you’re dying to unleash every horror under the sun upon them. But, Calvin, you’re only human.”

Lyons snorted ferociously.

“That ugly bugger, he’s a bloody nightmare come to life. Do you honestly think there is a worse punishment on Earth than sending him after them?” McCarter asked.

“Well, since you put it that way,” James answered. “I know I sure wouldn’t want to see him as the last thing before I went to hell.”

McCarter gave his friend a clap on the shoulder. James would have gone to Japan and done his duty anyways. Still, it was good to relieve some of his tension and doubts.

“You done with the Mac and Lyons show?” Brognola asked, feeling a little impatient.