Sky Hammer

“Aw, shit.” the DJ sighed and picked up a phone. “Hello, Operator? Please give me the phone number for the Philadelphia division of Homeland Security.” He paused. “Yes, ma’am, this is an emergency.”

“What are you doing?” the engineer demanded, horrified, rushing out of the booth.

“Doing the right thing. We’re ratting these assholes out, and I hope Homeland puts ’em in a cell down in Gitmo. With extra rolls of film.”

The engineer rolled his eyes heavenward. “That guy on the phone was right. You’re an idiot.”

“That may be,” the DJ said, feeling oddly patriotic. “But if you have any porn on the computer, better start purging. Homeland might check it out, and this dump needs you.”

“Sure, who else would work for these wages?” The engineer snorted rudely. Then he returned to the booth and started hastily accessing files on the station’s PC to delete them like crazy.

Trevose, Pennsylvania

“WHAT IS A ZOG?” Zdenka Salvai asked as her commander got behind the steering wheel.

“Something Nazis talk about,” Bella Tokay replied, tucking away the voice scrambler, then starting the stolen car.

The vehicle had been obtained outside of a strip club on Admiral Wilson Boulevard in Camden, located just over the bridge from Philadelphia. Few people told friends that they were going to a strip club, thus they were safe to kill. The owner of the vehicle wouldn’t be missed for a long time. Perhaps days. Eventually his body would be found; a corpse inside a plastic garbage bag soon filled it with fumes, and the bags often popped like balloons. It wasn’t the optimum way of disposing of a body, but it was sufficient for today. They needed only a few hours.

The redhead lit a fresh cigarette. “I hate Nazis,” she stated, puffing out every word. Her long fingers were stained yellow from the constant cigarettes and her teeth were the same. But few men ever noticed that, their vision rarely rising above her ample cleavage. Between her knees was a large object covered with a blanket. Some sort of metallic hose could be seen sticking out from underneath, and there was the faint smell of jellied gasoline.

Tokay laughed. “As do we all,” he agreed, releasing the brake and heading north on Route 1. Bethlehem was far away, but they had plenty of time. On the seat next to the man was a newspaper, the checkered grip of a compact machine gun barely visible beneath it.

“Think they will take the bait?” Petrov Delellis asked from the rear seat. Cradling a bulky X-18 grenade launcher, the giant Hungarian seemed to fill the back of the sedan. There was a clean new bandage on the side of his neck, a gift from the stubborn CIA agent in Paris. A goodbye gift.

“Of course they’ll take the bait,” Tokay replied smugly, steering around a flatbed truck hauling steel beams. “And they’ll waste precious time chasing us around, until the Castle is obtained, and then the boss lets us kill them.”

“We can’t kill them now?” Salvai said with a scowl.

Tokay smiled, cold and mercilessly. “Well, maybe one or two,” he answered.

Sandy Hook, New Jersey

AS GRIM AS EXECUTIONERS, Able Team strode out of the rolling smoke screen, firing their weapons at every step. Ricochets zinged and threw sparks along the concrete wall separating the parking lot from the little museum, and people with guns ducked behind the stout barrier.

Still bodies sprawled everywhere on the asphalt between the rows of cars, including a state trooper without a face, a 9 mm HK pistol still in his hand, unfired. A former Los Angeles cop himself, Carl “Ironman” Lyons felt a visceral surge of rage at the sight, but controlled his temper for the moment and kept going. The dead and the dying didn’t matter right now. Only killing the terrorist bastards who had invaded the beachfront park.

Unfortunately, Able Team had no counterattack plan, no clever tactics or fancy maneuvering. The numbers had fallen, and the three counterterrorists had arrived too late to stop the deadly assault on the vacation spot. Now all they could do was a full-frontal charge with guns blazing.

Moving from vehicle to vehicle, the three Stony Man operatives maintained a steady cover fire with their assault rifles and shotguns. Circling a bread truck, they caught one of the Red Star agents in the process of reloading his AK-47 rifle. The arming bolt had jammed, probably from overheating. The Chinese agent cursed at their sudden appearance and dropped the Kalashnikov to claw for a Norinco pistol at his side.

“Don’t do it, bub,” Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz warned, leveling his M-16 assault rifle.

But if the Chinese agent understood the words, he made no sign, and the deadly Norinco .45 barely cleared leather when Gadgets sent a wreath of tumblers across the man’s chest. The Red Star agent was thrown backward against a car, shattering the side windows with his splayed arms. Gurgling into death, the agent slid to the asphalt, leaving a trail of red across the car. But Able Team was already on the move, constantly trying to stay ahead of the terrorists. A split second later, a Chinese-made RPG streaked out from behind the souvenir kiosk and the Buick erupted into a fireball from the white phosphorus rounds.

Popping up from behind a concrete wall near the public restrooms, a Chinese operative fired a long burst from his machine gun, riding the chattering weapon in a tight figure-eight pattern for maximum killpower. The cars in the parking lot were torn apart by the hellstorm of incoming lead, windshields exploding, hoods buckling, tires bursting, and finally a stray ricochet got a gas tank and a compact car violently detonated into a fireball, spraying shrapnel across a dozen other vehicles.

Taking a stance, Schwarz pumped a shell from the M-203 mounted under the barrel of his M-16. The bomb tracked perfectly, arching high to land on the other side of the concrete seawall. The Red Star agents scattered as thick volumes of smoke rose from the hissing charge. But a salty warm breeze was blowing in from nearby coast, already thinning the protective cover.

“On three,” Lyons said, readying the Atchisson autoshotgun in his arms. He had only a single 40 round drum with him, so every shot had to count. He hadn’t been expecting a firefight! “Okay…three!”

The men broke around another SUV, got onto the dented hood of a station wagon and jumped to the top of the seawall. Two Red Star agents were crouching behind the barrier, their weapons aimed for the open section ten feet away, obviously waiting in ambush.

“Hey,” Rosario “The Politician” Blancanales said softly.

The Communists started to turn and Able Team cut them down. Hopping to the terrazzo flooring, Lyon found a few more civilian bodies, mostly guards. Older out of shape men in clean uniforms, holstered revolvers at their side. This had been a part-time job for them, just something to help stretch their meager retirement pay.

On the nearby beach the corpses of several joggers dotted the shoreline, their blood still staining the waves as they washed over the still forms, giving them a horrible mockery of life.

“Look over there,” Lyons told his teammates.

Through the thinning smoke, the men could see the long barrels of the old WWII cannons rising above the small museum and fast-food stand.

Originally, Sandy Hook had been a large brick tower resembling a lighthouse, a stony keep equipped with muzzle-loading cannons to attack any Imperial British frigates harrowing the guerrilla fighters in the Revolutionary War. During World War II, it became a concrete fortress armed with banks of sixteen-inch cannons that could blow open the hull of any German warship. During the cold war underground installation had been added and Sandy Hook became a Minute Man missile base, designed to knock down Soviet ICBMs. Sandy Hook had long been a bastion of defense for the east coast of the nation, and had seen a lot of fighting, including an invasion of German frogmen near the middle of World War II, saboteurs sent to blow phone lines, collapse bridges, burn down hospitals and movie theaters, and generally inflict as much harm and terror as possible upon the American people. Softening tactics for Hitler. A prelude to invasion. Paving the way. The big guns of Sandy Hook had fired upon the midnight invaders just as they got out of the rubber rafts, and not a Nazi agent reached American soil alive. Or even in one piece.

But that was sixty years ago. These days, the Minute Man missile base had been moved inland, away from the vulnerable beach, and the gigantic cannons had been disarmed, the barrels blocked with a concrete plug, the hydraulic lines removed, the firing pins gone. Once the guardians of the United States, the cannons were reduced to slightly rusty exhibits on public display, relics of the past standing alongside a small outside museum that told of the glory days, with a small gift shop. But the Pentagon Theoretical Danger Team had postulated there was a potential terrorist danger to New York at Sandy Hook. Long ago, when the cannons worked, they had a range of twelve miles, and Manhattan was just over the horizon, nine miles away. But the titanic weapons had been neutralized, disarmed, virtually disassembled. It would take a major undertaking to get them live again. So the Pentagon had placed the museum on the Watch Alert list and then promptly forgot about the place entirely. It was too nebulous a threat to be taken seriously.

Suddenly two men in greasy mechanic’s coveralls appeared on the roof of the restrooms building and started firing assault rifles. Able Team dived for cover behind a painted wooden bench and came up returning fire. The chattering M-16 assault rifles held by Blancanales and Schwarz peppered the structure, driving the enemy under cover. When the firing stopped, they popped back and Lyon’s Atchisson sprang into action. In a bull roar, the weapon discharged 12-gauge shotgun shells in a long burst. The Chinese agents were literally blown apart, their bodies shattered from the hellstorm of steel buckshot.

Even before the corpses tumbled to the ground, Able Team was on the move again.

Early that morning, the first indication that something was amiss had been a radiation sensor hidden in a tollbooth plaza on the Garden State Parkway. Considered the finest road in the world, the GSP actually received visitors from foreign countries to study its construction so that the builders could return to their homelands and try to duplicate the modern marvel. Tourists from New Jersey visiting Portugal, Argentina or Australia often found themselves experiencing déjâ vu as they encountered an exact duplicate of the New Jersey road cutting through the rolling hills of a foreign landscape.

When the cars stopped to pay the toll, one of many along the rather expensive GSP, every vehicle was probed for contraband. Chemical sniffers found a lot of drugs and sometimes a corpse in the trunk. But this day the hidden sensors spiked as weapons-grade plutonium was detected coming off Exit 9.

Quickly, computer records were checked, but since there was no record of such a radioactive source coming onto the superhighway, the state police tagged the report as a possible glitch. The police filed a copy of the report with Homeland Security and a minute later Stony Man knew about it. Since Exit 9 was dangerously close to Sandy Hook, Barbara Price had sent Able Team to do a recon. When the men arrived, they’d expected to find an ore truck full of pitchblende, or maybe a mobile health clinic. Portable X-ray machines used radioactive thulium and often set off detectors by mistake.

Instead, Able Team had discovered a parking lot full of dead tourists and an empty truck that had been full of greasy machinery. But not anymore. Grabbing weapons out of the back of their van, the team got hard and moved in fast. They didn’t like the combination of murder, Sandy Hook and radiation. There was such a thing as nuclear artillery shell….

“Any heat?” Lyons demanded, checking the Atchisson on the run. He wished there were reloads for the hungry weapon, half of the shells were already gone, and this battle was barely ten minutes old.

“Bet your ass, there is,” Schwarz said, firing a burst into some bushes. Leaves flew, but nobody tumbled out dead. Stealth wasn’t a concern, the Red Star agents knew they were here. Schwarz was the electronics expert for the team, and his wristwatch was also a short-range Geiger counter. However, loud clicks during a battle could get a soldier killed, so instead the device vibrated as a warning. At the moment, it was going wild.

“They must be arming the shell,” Blancanales repeated, pausing to roll a dummy grenade into the gift shop.

Inside the building, men cursed in Chinese and came bursting out, firing their weapons. Already in position, Able Team caught the Red Star agents in a withering cross fire and they died to a man.

Then a man and woman stumbled into view from around a corner. The man was carrying a wicker basket and the woman was holding a baby swaddled in blankets in her arms. Neither one was Chinese, they looked more Italian than anything else.

“Don’t shoot!” the man yelled, stepping in front of his wife. “Please! I’ll pay you whatever you want!”

“It’s a trick!” Blancanales cried, raising his M-16.

Dropping the blanket, the snarling woman pulled a compact SDMG machine pistol from inside the plastic doll and started firing. Blancanales blew her away just as the man swung a Skorpion machine gun from behind his back. Schwarz shot the man in the chest to no effect, then Lyons triggered the Atchisson, the maelstrom of double-aught stainless-steel buckshot removing his face and opening the throat and lower belly like a can of spaghetti. Already dead, the Chinese operative spun, his hands instinctively tightening on the weapon, the deadly Skorpion spraying lead randomly as he toppled to the ground. Ricochets went everywhere and Schwarz grunted as a slug hit him in the stomach.

“Goddamn mercs,” he muttered, rubbing his stomach. “The guy must have been wearing body armor.”

“Still hurts like a bitch,” Lyons stated, hefting the Atchisson. Only a few cartridges remained. After that, he was down to grenades and his pistol.