Triplecross

The two men behind Kirkpatrick were Conyers and Gomez. And if those were their real names, Lyons would eat his shoulder holster. While Kirkpatrick and Conyers looked the parts their names implied, Gomez was clearly Asian, not Hispanic. He was very big for an Asian man, easily massing as much as his partners did.

“These are back-breakers,” Schwarz whispered from the other side of the Suburban. “No way is the operation here legit.” The electronics expert spoke quietly enough that his partners could hear him through their earpieces, but the security team would not be able to listen in.

“Can I help you gentlemen?” Kirkpatrick asked.

“Justice Department,” Lyons said, flashing the credentials Brognola had issued to the team. “We’re investigating an international commerce issue.”

Kirkpatrick exchanged glances with Conyers. Gomez, for his part, simply stared at Lyons as if he could bore a hole through the big ex-cop with nothing but a hostile look.

“I’m going to need to see a warrant,” Kirkpatrick said.

“This identification is all the warrant I need,” said Lyons. He wasn’t really the authoritarian type; he respected the Constitution as much as the next guy. But something was off about these characters and he wasn’t going to play along. The fastest way to get them to cut to the chase was just to push their buttons until they revealed what they were after.

“No entry to unauthorized personnel,” Kirkpatrick said At the words “no entry,” Gomez and Conyers began to fan out in an attempt to flank Able Team.

I don’t like where this is going, thought Lyons, but I can’t say I’m surprised.

“Maybe you don’t understand, Slick,” Lyons said. “We’re with the Justice Department. To go higher than us you have to have a word with the President. Something’s dirty here in Denmark and we’re going to find it. Step aside.”

Kirkpatrick’s stance changed. Lyons saw it; Kirkpatrick saw that Lyons saw it. Both men knew the hammer was about to fall. The “security guard” was getting ready to bring up his M-4. Lyons couldn’t see the selector switch on the weapon, but he had to bet that all three men had their safeties off and rounds in the chambers.

“No entry,” Kirkpatrick said, his teeth clenched, “to unauthorized personnel.” He moved to take a diagonal step back, which was his attempt to get off the attacking line and bring his weapon into play. Lyons was already moving. As Kirkpatrick tried to raise his M-4, Lyons’s Python was in his fist. The snout of the big pistol came up under Kirkpatrick’s chin, below his line of vision. It was an old trick, but a good one. Kirkpatrick was already visualizing Lyons’s death, already taking up the slack in the M-4’s trigger, his expression one of triumph. That changed the moment the barrel of the Python touched the flesh under his jaw.

“Here’s my authorization.” Lyons pulled the trigger.

The top of Kirkpatrick’s head exploded. Lyons pushed the corpse away, watching it fall back as he backpedaled to the only cover available, which was the Suburban. Schwarz and Blancanales had already opened up on the other two gunmen, driving them back toward the double doors of the mining office entrance.

There was a heartbeat’s lull in the firefight as the two security guards dove inside the office. Schwarz ripped open the duffel bag. “Carl!” he called.

Lyons held out a hand. Schwarz tossed him the heavy USAS-12 automatic shotgun. He threw Blancanales’s M-4 to him and then hooked his support hand through the trigger guard of his 93-R machine pistol, using the fold-down foregrip to brace the weapon.

Schwarz and Blancanales advanced on the double doors, covering each other as they left the shelter of the Suburban. Blancanales reached out and tried the door handle, pulling his hand back quickly lest he lose it to a spray of gunfire from the other side. Nothing happened. The door was solidly locked. The walls flexed slightly, however.

“Talk about cheap construction,” Blancanales said.

“It’s a prefab trailer,” Schwarz said. “Big and modular, probably multiple trailer units interconnected. Flimsy. But the doors are held on good.”

“Let’s do this,” Lyons said. He leveled the USAS-12 at the lower set of hinges on the left side and pulled the trigger. The hinge disintegrated under the barrage of 00 Buck. It took less time to blow the second one; Lyons simply raised the barrel and rode out the recoil. He stepped aside as the door fell off.

Bullets flew from inside. The guards were shooting back, the sounds of their M-4 carbines unmistakable. It was said, and Lyons knew it to be true, that the Kalashnikov had a distinctive metallic noise. This was due in part to all the empty space under its receiver cover, which turned the AK into a metal drum when rounds were cycled through it. But the 3 AR platform and its variants also had a distinctive sound, with which Lyons and the other members of Able Team had become very familiar. If you’d heard it enough you could never forget it.

Blancanales’s M-4 had been modified and tuned by Kissinger, as had all their weapons. Blancanales squeezed several long, full-auto bursts. Among the modifications Kissinger regularly preformed was to replace the 3-round-burst mode with sustained full-automatic. The men of Able Team were more than capable of the trigger-control required to avoid wasting ammunition.

“I’d say we’ve got ample verification of hostile contact,” Schwarz noted.

“Affirmative,” Lyons said. Noting Blancanales had the most forward position of the team, he asked, “What’s it look like in there, Pol?”

Blancanales waited for a moment, timing the bursts of fire from inside the mining office. When he judged he could risk it, he moved his head just enough to expose his left eye, then whipped his skull back out of the line of fire.

“Our two friends have backup,” Blancanales related. “I count two more, all armed. No civilians. No noncombatants anywhere in range.”

“Good,” Lyons said. “Gadgets, pull two grenades. No, three.”

“Three?” Schwarz queried.

“Three,” Lyons confirmed.

“Time to blow everybody up,” Schwarz said. He reached into the duffel bag, snaked his index finger through the pins of three grenades and popped all three bombs at once. Then he tossed them in quick succession through the doorway.

“Which did you—?”

“Willie Pete,” Schwarz said quietly.

“And Hell followed with them,” Blancanales whispered.

The white-phosphorous grenades ignited. The screams from within the mining office were beyond horrible. Each grenade carried 15 ounces of white phosphorous and had a burst radius of 34 meters on open ground. Within the corridor of the mining office, detonated simultaneously as a trio, the blasts would create a fiery tunnel of molten death that bored through any human being unfortunate enough to be in the way. The cloud of smoke created was immediate and overpowering.

“Let’s move,” Lyons said. “Secondary entrance to the west.”

“Roger that,” Schwarz said.

“Affirmative,” Blancanales said.

Under cover of the pall of smoke drifting from the flaming charnel house that was now the main entrance, Able Team took up positions around the west entrance. This door, too, was secured, but the thunderous hammer blows of Lyons’s automatic 12-gauge made short work of the barrier. When the three men of Able Team finally entered the building, fire alarms were sounding through the halls. Through the distant screams, Able Team could also hear fire extinguishers being deployed. Schwarz hoped for his enemies’ sake that those extinguishers were chemical models and not simply tanks of water. Water would only scatter the hungry white phosphorous, which would burn until it no longer had oxygen to feed it.

The corridor in which Able stood was comprised of offices, each with a name on a faux brass nameplate on the door. There was no reason not to check them. Lyons signaled to his partners, pointing to the next set of doors. The team worked its way up the hall, kicking in the doors on either side as they went, with Blancanales and Schwarz working the entries and Lyons stationed in the corridor for backup.

Something creaked in the ceiling above. “I think we’re doing some serious damage to this place,” Blancanales said. “It sounds like the roof is coming apart.”

“If the fire spreads to the crawl space above the drop ceiling,” Schwarz noted, “it will move very rapidly. We need to be careful we don’t get cut off.”

“I’ll shoot us an exit, if it comes to that,” Lyons said. “I have slugs if we need them. They’ll carve through the pasteboard this place seems to be made of.”

There was still plenty of ammo left in Lyons’s 20-round drum. He scarcely felt the weight of the heavy USAS-12. The weapon was comforting in his big fists. He liked knowing that he had the option of laying down a cloud of 00 Buck that would shred almost any resistance. Each 12-gauge double-aught shell carried nine pellets, each roughly comparable to a 9mm bullet. To be on the receiving end of most of a drum of those shells was world-changing for just about anyone and anything.

The ceiling creaked again. “That’s not sounding good,” Blancanales warned.

“Keep moving,” Lyons directed. “We’re up against the clock.”

The sweep of the corridor turned up nothing. It was time to take the party closer to the main entrance, where more EarthGard personnel appeared to be active in trying to quell the chemical flames. The prefab office was arranged like a wagon wheel, with a central hub and multiple spokes. They were reaching the hub, opposite the spoke that bore the Willy Pete conflagration, when something felt wrong.

“Gadgets,” Lyons said. “Pol. Look.” He pointed. The security camera set in the wall had been turning, but now it was pointed directly at them. Lyons realized what had been nibbling at the edges of his awareness. There were automatic security cameras in every corridor, and these had been moving mindlessly back and forth when they’d first entered the building. But the cameras had been stopping and tracking them, quietly, as they’d made their way through the structure. And if they were being tracked, that meant the enemy wasn’t nearly as confused and ineffective as Able Team had been led to believe. It meant the enemy—

Lyons looked up.

“Hit the walls!” he shouted. He shoved Schwarz, who was within arm’s reach, against the far wall of the corridor, flattening himself against the fiberboard of the hallway.

Tiles from the drop ceiling rained down, followed by gunfire. The security guards, obviously coordinating with someone operating the cameras from a control area within the mining office, had crawled along above the drop ceiling until they were in position to take out Able Team.