Don Pendleton - Target Acquisition

Lyons leaned over toward Schwarz. “What did she say? The guy is our what?”

“Raisin entrée,” Schwarz replied.

Hawkins snorted out loud. “You guys are like Abbot and Costello.” The ex-Ranger trooper shifted his gaze over to Rosario Blancanales. “Sorry—Three Stooges.”

The Puerto Rican ex-Green Beret gave the Texan a wan smile. “Fuck you very much, T.J.”

“Did you say ‘Prince’?” Rafael Encizo interrupted.

“Yes,” Price answered. “Saudi oil actually—if there’s any other kind. His father is very high up in the defense ministry. He is, in fact, Osama bin Laden’s second cousin. He is a crown prince.”

Encizo leaned his stocky build back into his chair and whistled. He eyed the picture of the Saudi prince up on the screen the way an alcoholic eyed an unopened bottle of liquor.

“Meaning?” Schwarz asked.

“Meaning there are somewhere in the neighborhood of eight hundred princes in the Kingdom Saud, currently,” Price explained. “Of those only a very tight handful are even remotely likely to succeed to the throne. Bin Sultan al-Thani is one of them.”

Silence greeted her proclamation. Price smirked; she loved it when she was able to shut them up.

David McCarter let out a long, slow whistle as James shook his head in disbelief.

“This explains why the Agency punted to JSOC and JSOC handed off to us,” Manning muttered.

Brognola spoke up. “Technically only the paramilitary operations officers of the CIA’s Special Activities Division can legally do this. By handing off to JSOC, the Agency hoped to quash the deal. My contact hoped to pull a bureaucratic riposte by coming to us.”

“Who cares what’s holding up the pinheads. I’ve always wanted to kill royalty,” Lyons said.

“Then I suggest we get cracking,” Price replied. “We only have a narrow window to make this work.”

Islamabad, Pakistan

Carl Lyons regarded the target building through his night-vision scope.

He ran the Starlite model attached to his baffled SVD sniper rifle along the exposed windows, putting each dark square in his crosshairs before smoothly scanning onward. He looked for fixed points to use as quick landmarks once the shooting started as he played the optic across the building’s roof.

“Able Actual in position. All clear on roof,” he murmured into his throat mike.

Across the street on the second leg of their L-shaped overwatch positions Rosario Blancanales nestled in closer to the Pachmayr recoil pad on the buttstock of his own silenced SVD. “Able Beta in position. All clear on primary and secondary approach routes,” he replied.

Lyons shifted his scope, running it along the length of a fire escape leading down to the dark alley that would serve as Phoenix Force’s primary insertion point. “Able Epsilon, status please?”

“We barely ever get out of the Western Hemisphere,” Schwarz answered into the com link, “and you take me to a shithole like this? What? Was Paris blacked out on your frequent-flyer miles?”

“Are we clear on the ground floor, Able Epsilon?” Lyons repeated.

In the back of the blacked-out 1970s model delivery van Hermann Schwarz eased back the charging handle on his RPK machine gun. The muzzle of the weapon was set just back from the access panel covertly placed in the rear door of the vehicle.

“Six o’clock clear,” Schwarz conceded.

From his rooftop position Lyons touched a finger to his earbud. “You copy that, Stony?”

“Copy, Stony here,” Barbara Price’s cool voice responded on the other end of the satellite bounce. “Phoenix Actual, you are clear on approach.”

“Phoenix Actual copy,” David McCarter responded. “En route.”

Carl Lyons pulled his face away from his scope and quickly did a security check of his area. It was very early in the morning and the residential block was like a ghost town. Despite this, the leader of Able Team felt naked and exposed.

Unable to field adequate overwatch because of insufficient personnel assets, the Farm’s JSOC liaison had requested additional manpower. Price had no choice but to deploy Able Team as security element for Phoenix Force’s raid.

Because the Farm’s teams were operating black inside Pakistan, local coordination and cover had been impossible. Able Team had taken their positions only minutes prior to the strike. Dressed as Islamabad riot police to disguise their Western features and delay any alert to the authorities, they would be exposed to a confused, frightened and potentially hostile indigenous population should their positions be discovered.

Speed and decisive of action on the part of Phoenix Force was their best hope at this point.

Across the street from Carl Lyons, Rosario Blancanales shifted his scope and took in the alley running next to the target building. A blacked-out delivery van with a sliding side door identical to the one occupied by Schwarz suddenly swerved into the alley.

Instantly, Blancanales shifted his aim and began scanning his overwatch sectors to provide Phoenix Force with security.

In the alley Phoenix exited the vehicle, leaving the engine running. The dome and cargo lights had been disabled so that the five-man team looked like black shadows leaking from a dark box as they approached the building’s side entrance.

T. J. Hawkins produced a claw-toothed crowbar and the countdown began.

ON THE SIXTH FLOOR of the target building Ziad Jarrah bin Sultan al-Thani put his cup of strong coffee down and drew heavily on his cigarette. His eyes squinted against the harsh smoke as he surveyed the room.

Three hollow-eyed men in Western business suits with Skorpion machine pistols were spread across the room while a fourth man, their boss, spoke with quiet tones into a satellite phone. A Wahhabite cleric had a Koran open in his lap and was reading a passage to a sweating teenage boy sitting in a straight-backed kitchen chair.

Two men, explosives experts from the Pakistani terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba, carefully rigged the boy with a suicide bomber vest packed with powerful Semtex plastic explosive.

It was a warm night in Islamabad but all the doors and windows to the apartment were tightly closed for security reasons. Ziad Jarrah had stripped off his expensive robes and was wearing only a ribbed cotton white muscle shirt, his olive skin damp with sweat.

The Saudi carefully lined up packets of riyals on the table. The currency totaled the equivalent of five thousand U.S. dollars. The sum would be paid to the suicide bomber’s family upon his detonation. The bomber’s rewards would come later, in heaven.

Ziad Jarrah thought how nice and cool the vice dens of Dubai would be, or his palace in Riyadh. But he grew so bored there. He loved being out on the edge of the jihad—not too close, but close enough to feel the vicarious thrill of murder plotted and murder committed.

He placed the last stack of money on the table, made eye contact with the bomber, nodded, then began putting the money into a manila envelope. Once he was done he stubbed out his cigarette and immediately lit another. He smoothed down each side of his thin mustache where it ran into the sparse hair of his goatee.

He drew in deeply, filling his lungs with smoke. Across the room the leader of the KLPD unit abruptly clicked off his phone. He turned toward the kitchen table and his suit coat swung open, revealing his own machine pistol in a shoulder holster.

“Abdul.” The security service officer smiled. “My brother, we are ready. You go to glory!”

The bomber looked down as one of the terrorist explosives engineers placed the detonator in his hand. Another Lashkar-e-Taiba operative stepped forward and began to use black electrician’s tape to secure the ignition device to the bomber’s hand. Neither Ziad Jarrah nor the KLPD officer bothered to tell the martyr in the chair that there was a ignition failsafe built around a Nokia cell phone constructed directly into the bomb.