Dick Stivers - Royal Flush

"You're crazy," Lyons pressed. "Twenty dead people and the next in line would have been suspect number one."

"But I was going to be hit, too, jerk." She laughed crazily, saliva splashing from her immobilized mouth. "McGowan would have staged an attack on me as well."

"Then that's the way it's gonna be," Lyons said without emotion. "You're going to be hit too…"

"No!" she screamed, cringing. "Don't do it! I beg of you!"

"Lady," Lyons said once again, "I don't have the time."

As his finger pressed on the trigger, Lady Carole shoved the barrel from her mouth with the handbag. Desperately, insanely, she rummaged in the bag for her handgun. Lyons eased up on the finger pressure. He let her find what she sought.

The woman pulled a small caliber piece from the bag and pointed it at her assailant.

Just as she pulled the trigger, Lyons's Colt boomed. The point-blank explosion thrust the woman's small gun under her disintegrating chin, where it discharged in turn.

Lyons's blast had taken her face away, but her own shot creased what remained of her forehead and took off her hair.

Lyons looked aghast as the dead woman's wig flew from the pulpy head to reveal a hairless skull covered in scabs and sores.

The faceless nonbeing lay crumpled in a heap at the bottom of the wall. The woman had been fearfully sick before she died. Cancerous lesions of the skull stood exposed to Lyons as he backed away from the remains.

His partners joined him. The mouth of the small alley filled with curious soldiers and police.

"Good diagnosis, good treatment, Doctor Lyons," Gadgets joked without smiling.

"And in the best tradition of British socialism," observed Blancanales, "she got it free."

It was not over for Carl Lyons. The shooting of the Shillelagh woman had disturbed his whole being.

Asleep at the U.S. Embassy four hours after the hit, he thrashed about wildly on the bed. Suddenly he awoke in a sweat. The action on foreign soil — maybe killing the woman — had set it off again.

He was scared. And he knew damn well what caused him such fear. A recurring nightmare haunted his sleep since his woman — his woman — had met her death. The dreams filled him with horror, especially since the nightmare was different each time. Each hideous experience was a variation on the death of Flor Trujillo…

This time he knew the gunman would follow Flor to the airport, that there would be yet another death. In the dream, he leaned against a row of lockers and scanned the crowd.

He saw Flor as she approached the metal detector at the entrance to the waiting area. She was beautiful. Not sick, not crazy, not violent. Just a totally beautiful woman. She joined the group of travelers already in the line. She was last. Lyons watched. From time to time she craned her neck to look through a huge plate-glass window at the planes on the tarmac.

Lyons could see the runway area through the window. The brightly painted Ecuatoriana Airlines jet looked like a Chinese paper bird in his dream. He saw the fuel attendant remove the nozzle of the hose from the plane's fueling port.

Then it was Flor's turn to go through the detector. Once Flor left the departure area, she would be safe.

The gunshot thundered in the confines of the glassed-in corridor. The slug lifted Flor onto her toes.

Even in death she was spectacular. Her exquisitely sculpted calves stood out fiercely as she rose on tiptoe. Thigh muscles strained against white cotton walking shorts. Well-shaped buttocks clenched.

Lyons watched her back arch slightly, her arms upraised as purse, passport, documents flew out of her hands.

Then she crumpled to the floor. He rushed from cover, panning his revolver across the hallway.

Nothing moved. People lay flat the entire length of the corridor. Slowly he let his arm fall as he stepped backward to where Flor lay.

She was lying on her side on the grooved rubber mat of the departure-lounge entrance.

Lyons knelt beside the inert form. He turned the body onto its back. He looked at her fine Hispanic features. He saw her full lips, cherry red with blood, touched with a hint of a smile.

Something slammed into his gut so hard that Lyons thought he was hit. Then he recognized the pain for what it was.

Lyons, awake now, moaned to think of Flor. The woman was the only person with whom he had shared his soul. Lyons hurt inside for his mother also, dead for ten years. She had known nothing of the good life, nor had she expected it. Lyons cried inside for his drunken father who achieved with his loins what he had failed to achieve in a wayward and vagrant life, and thus presented Carl to the world.

Finally, Lyons wept for himself, the lonely adolescent, the sad teenager who closely guarded his every step upward, afraid it would be taken away from him. He did everything right, followed all the rules. That was why he had become a policeman.

Lyons remembered target practice at the LAPD training academy, the first day in the shooting booth when he thought he'd blown his chance to become a cop and make something of himself.

As the dummy popped up before him, he started shooting at the head. For a fleeting instant he saw his father's face on the cardboard cutout. Lyons kept squeezing the trigger until there were no bullets left in the pistol. He continued to squeeze the trigger, again and again, until the weapons instructor tapped him on the shoulder and told him to quit it.

From that day, he understood the degree to which he must contain the rage within him.

As a member of Able Team he had demonstrated on occasion a volcanic nature that made his two colleagues shake their heads. Now he struggled to relax and empty his mind in a land far from home where once again he had acted like a raging storm.

One battle was over. But the battle within him would never be done.

The military jet warmed up outside the hangar as the Americans shook hands with a small group of people.

Leo Turrin, his head wrapped in bandages again to conceal his identity during the drive from London, looked forward to the bandages' removal on the plane, though they would have to go back on before he disembarked.

"Right to the last you fed lies to Shillelagh, Mr. Sticker!" Lieutenant Colonel Carlton shouted above the whine of the aircraft's turbines. "You held out. You're a tough bugger! I have a souvenir for you, my friend."

Leo accepted the odd device from the colonel. It looked like one-half of a telephone receiver. "What the hell is this?"

"Turn on the switch, hold the large part to your throat, and whisper."

"Like this? Oh, shit!" he exclaimed, in the distorted electronic voice that had tormented him in that room.

"It's used by people who have lost the use of their own voice," the colonel said. "That's how she managed to protect her identity for so long — she dealt with most of her contacts over the telephone."

Minutes later, the Americans gave a final wave to their British colleagues and boarded the waiting aircraft.

The Air Force jet hammered through clouds. The green checkerboard grid of the British countryside had ended abruptly as a meandering white ribbon of foam marked the start of the English Channel.

The plane streaked on a course due southeast.

Only two men on the aircraft knew their destination: the pilot and Leo Turrin.

Turrin had just finished his report on the Windsor Castle hit to Stony Man Farm. Now he pondered the information given in exchange.

The destination data he had passed on to the pilot. Behind him he heard the lighthearted banter of the men of Able Team.

He understood the relief the warriors felt at wrapping up this foreign mission successfully. He wondered if the men could stand the strain of their next ordeal. Turrin did not envy the trio as he thought of the hostile terrain of the Hindu Kush.