Extermination

Lyons opened a link to his partners as he dumped his empty shotgun, exiting the smugglers’ office. “Able One reporting in.”

“There you are,” Schwarz said. “I didn’t see one bit of the Chicago skyline disappear, so I thought you were taking a nap.”

Lyons knew that his friend’s levity was concealing concern for his safety. “Tell Mott to hold up until I get there. I’ve got trouble brewing in Idaho now.”

“At least four of the bombs landed in a little armpit of a town called Albion,” Schwarz told him. “We’re heading there to see what’s up.”

“Never heard of the place,” Lyons answered, sliding behind the wheel of his rental car.

“Never will again,” Schwarz returned. “Everyone in town was killed, including several sheriff’s deputies.”

Lyons glared at the offices. Now that he was back in his car, he had access to an M-4 with an underbarrel grenade launcher. If anyone dared to poke his face out the front door, he’d lay into the mobsters with high-explosive death.

Sadly, the smugglers were too smart to tempt fate. They’d hunkered down, knowing that to pursue Lyons would be suicide.

“Play now, pay later,” Lyons snarled as a grim promise, driving off to the airport to meet with the rest of his team.

CHAPTER FOUR

In his younger days, David McCarter, the current leader of Phoenix Force, had earned the reputation of a hard-driving badass. He always seemed to be in a constant state of pent-up, impulsive action, easily growing bored, even with training exercises. He’d lived on the edge, primed and ready for battle. Back then, waiting for the start of conflict was something that ate at the young warrior’s nerves.

These days, though, as commander of Phoenix Force, McCarter learned what had been missing. He’d lived his entire life seeking challenges that could match his phenomenal skills, taking to the cockpit of any new aircraft he could to master its maneuvers, testing out various martial arts to find their strengths in relation to others. He devoured books continually, starting out in military history but spreading out to political philosophy and analysis of current events. Far from a thug, he realized that the untamed fires within his gut were a strength that sought a task worthy of him.

Being the brains of Phoenix Force was that task, and the times when his impatience would get the better of him had disappeared as he applied his experience to plotting actions and reactions even before the first shot was fired.

So when the Syrians attacked, just as McCarter had anticipated, he was not only ready, but had also prepared Phoenix Force to deal with the sudden arrival. Experience had taught the Briton that there was little that could be done when a member of a country’s covert-operations community came to harm or capture. He remembered avenging the deaths of colleagues, and he recalled when a Phoenix ally, Karl Hahn, was kidnapped by a terrorist group and the team went rogue to bring him home alive. The Syrians had lost men to Bezoar, and even if Damascus had sent orders for the hit team’s comrades to pull back, anger and loss of friends were powerful spurs.

There was no way they were going to let this insult to their fellowship pass.

McCarter also knew that sometimes anger made men sloppy. From their approach to the front doors, ignoring even the obviously armed Hawkins strolling down the street, McCarter knew that they were focused on the job of bringing hell to Bezoar and his crew of fellow murderers. He keyed his hands-free radio to toss out the orders.

“Go time. T.J., even the odds should Bezoar’s people or the Syrians seem to be winning. Keep out of the way, though. You’re not packed for a proper dustup,” McCarter ordered. “Gary…”

“Eyes in the sky, backing T.J. and monitoring you,” Manning answered.

“Rafe, Cal, it’s on,” McCarter said. “T.J., remember, nothing gets past you to the public.”

“On it,” Hawkins answered.

Amid the chatter of automatic weapons, the men of Phoenix Force took flight.

THE SYRIANS HAD blown in, loaded for bear, especially if that bear wore tank armor and carried a grenade launcher, Hawkins mused as he found cover in a doorway, drawing the sleek Belgian P-90 machine pistol from under his jacket. Three SUVs screeched to a halt, windows open and assault rifles hammering at the windows of Bezoar’s Parisian safehouse. The twisting, narrow street in front of the house was clogged by the big vehicles’ presence. They opened fire on the windows of the storefront that Bezoar had set up as a diner so ram-shackle that even the prostitutes didn’t want a piece of it. The roar of big engines in the predawn had sent the women scrambling, their street instincts telling them that the trucks had either belonged to police or an organized hit crew.

Either way, they wanted nothing to do with that fight, disappearing between buildings or scurrying down the street past Hawkins. They studiously ignored him as the glass of the storefront diner disappeared in a solid wave of lead. Anyone who had been inside would have been shredded, and from what Hawkins had seen, there were a couple of men nursing cold coffee mugs as they cast anxious glares into the darkened street.

The Syrians weren’t holding back. The unmistakable thump of a 40 mm grenade launcher echoed down toward Hawkins’s doorway, its high-explosive message shaking the ground at his feet.

“Dave, the Syrians are going nuclear,” Hawkins said into his throat mike.

“Heard that,” McCarter replied. “Bide your time.”

Hawkins grimaced, hating the wait, but the Briton had given his orders, and he had pulled the team through countless confrontations.

The Syrians piled out of their vehicles, a dozen strong, as their trucks idled, drivers and shotgun riders waiting behind them to secure their getaway transportation. A quick glance told Hawkins that he was smart to have brought along a 50-round magazine full of armor-piercing ammunition. The SUVs were solidly built, and the way the lights of the skinny road reflected off their windshields let him know that they were armored. He reminded himself that Phoenix had wrung the compact machine pistols out, and their 5.8 mm rounds could punch through a titanium plate backed by twenty layers of Kevlar out to two hundred meters and go through 9 mm of steel plate at fifty. He was barely fifteen meters from the lead SUV, meaning that no matter how resistant the glass, he’d be able to put rounds into the interior without much effort.

One of the men in the lead truck poked his head and weapon out of the window. This guy had a submachine gun, as well, and he’d noticed Hawkins’s quick peek at the clogged road. Hawkins couldn’t make out what the gunner was packing, but it sure as hell wasn’t a folded newspaper and a cup of coffee. The roar of autofire filled the air as the doorjamb suddenly came alive with bullet impacts. Hawkins held his ground, enduring splinters of brick and old paint peppering his exposed face.

Whatever they were carrying, it was only a 9 mm, and for that he was grateful. Still, just because it couldn’t penetrate into his cubbyhole didn’t mean that Hawkins was free and clear to ignore the incoming fire. Once the barrage let up, Hawkins ducked low, rolled into the middle of the narrow road and opened up on a spot just above the SUV’s headlights.

The sleek, hypervelocity rounds from Hawkins’s PDW went to where he couldn’t see them above the glare of the lamps, but the clatter of a machine pistol on cobblestones rewarded the American Phoenix pro. He pumped out two more bursts, sweeping the headlights and blowing them out so that his night vision could recover from their bright flare. The engine snarled to life, and he could hear the vehicle jolt into gear.

Hawkins knew that the enemy was going to try to ram a half ton of truck down his throat, so he leveled the muzzle at the driver and cut loose. The last half of the P-90’s 50-round magazine elicited the crash and shatter of armored Plexiglas, but after a brief surge, the SUV no longer had pressure on the gas. The truck was idling forward, but its driver was dead.

Of course, that didn’t mean anything to the trailing SUVs. The gunners for each had clambered out behind partially open armored doors, scanning for Hawkins in the darkened street. Without the blaze of the headlights, he was just a shadow, flat on the ground.

That wouldn’t last for long, though.

He reloaded the machine pistol swiftly, all the while scrambling toward the idling, driverless SUV, keeping in the shadows from where the other vehicles’ lamps blazed down the narrow road. Hawkins rested against the bumper.

“Gary, leave anything for me?” Hawkins asked, knowing that such a question was moot when it came to the Canadian sniper.

TO MAINTAIN a low profile on this operation, the members of Phoenix Force opted for a set of tools that would help them look as if they were French special operations. This meant that their gear was typical police or military equipment. It allowed them use of familiar gear such as the PAMAS G1—a license-built Beretta 92-F—the FN P-90 and the suppressed rifle Gary Manning was currently riding, a PGM Ultima Ratio “Integral Silencieux” rifle in 7.62 x 51 mm NATO.

The Commando was a shortened version designed especially for urban operations teams. It was affixed with a 15.7-inch, integrally silenced barrel as opposed to the standard 24-inch tube, meaning that inside a crowded city, the Commando was handy and quick. Manning liked the name Ultima Ratio because it was Latin for “the last resort,” a term that went with Phoenix Force hand-in-hand, and it was derived from the original term ultima ratio regum, which was “the final argument of kings.” Since Phoenix Force had adapted their code names to variants of “king” and the phrase was a flowery synonym for “war”, Manning felt it was tailor-made for his cover identity of Gary Roy.

As soon as T. J. Hawkins started to take fire from the three SUVs in the street, he swung the muzzle of the suppressed Commando toward the convoy. Only one gunner was actively shooting, and as soon as he stopped his fusillade, Hawkins was in action. Through the optics of the rifle, he could see the muzzle-flashes of the P-90 through the end of its blunt silencer.

The headlights went out and the SUV lurched into action, but more autofire erupted from Hawkins’s position. Manning turned his attention to the other vehicles and saw that their gunners who had waited outside on security for the Syrian assault force were now looking for the source of the sudden, fierce combat that had erupted in front of them. The two gunmen were wary, but their attention was focused ahead of them, not behind and above.

Manning had complete surprise against them as he milked the precision trigger of the skeletonized combat sniper. The rubber recoil pad and suppressor made the lightweight weapon’s kick feel like a tender caress against his brawny shoulder as he punched a hole through the neck of one of the Syrians. The rearmost man’s death was instantaneous, spine severed and lower brain destroyed. He didn’t even shudder, falling to the ground as if he were a marionette with its strings cut.

Only the chatter of metal on cobblestones alerted the second gunman, who whirled to see his friend lying facedown in a sprawl of loose limbs.

Manning worked the bolt on the Ultima Ratio swiftly, the finely polished steel gliding noiselessly as it stripped another .308 Winchester subsonic round off the top of the 10-round box magazine. The time between the first and second shots, which struck the remaining Syrian gunner in the bridge of his nose, was less than a second. The noise made by the subsequent rifle shot was softer than a polite cough, but on the receiving end, the armed commando’s head burst like a melon.

“Gary, leave anything for me?” Hawkins asked.

“Get the middle SUV,” Manning instructed as the rearmost vehicle ground into Reverse. He didn’t have a good angle to see the driver of the truck, but Manning knew that a frightened driver would be a threat, not only communicating to the main assault team that they were under fire, but also tearing through the streets of Paris to escape pursuit. People could be run over.

Manning worked the rifle’s action as fast as he could, firing round after round into the roof of the SUV, adjusting his aim so that his fire would lance down into the driver’s seat. On his fourth shot, the escaping vehicle slammed its rear bumper into a storefront, glass shattering violently, metal crumpling as it met unyielding stone.

Hawkins ripped into the remaining Syrian escape car, his P-90 hammering at 800 rounds per minute, turning its windshield into a gaping hole and the driver into a mushy figure that resembled a deflating humanoid balloon.

“I hope to hell no one heard that crash,” Hawkins said.

“With David and the rest inside, I doubt they’d hear the sky crashing around them,” Manning answered.

RAFAEL ENCIZO WINCED, leaning back from the sudden slash of shotgun shells vomiting swarms of pellets like hungry, flesh-eating hornets. Bezoar’s defenders had carefully chosen their place to make their stand, and with a stubby set of 12-gauge scatterguns, they were able to dominate the row of windows where Encizo saw an additional team of Syrians collapsed. Only one of the Damascus assault squad was still alive, but his cheek had been torn off his face, one eye leaking down into the gaping flesh.