Don Pendleton - Deadly Payload

While Manning and McCarter were tearing apart CPUs, James, Encizo and Hawkins were repairing the tires of one of the pickups. The Toyota pickup was a bit old and weathered, but an inspection showed that the vehicle was in good running condition. All it took was a tire change, and it would be back in action. The pickup would be less conspicuous than the covered trailers, as well as having the benefit of maneuverability.

Hawkins scrounged the other vehicles and found spare gasoline canisters.

“All set?” Manning asked James as he topped off the pickup’s tank.

“Yeah,” James replied. “Time to go?”

Manning looked at his watch. “We’ve got a minute.”

“Okay,” James said, screwing the cap on the jerri can.

“No, we’ve got a minute to reach minimum safe distance,” Manning explained.

“Aw heck. We were supposed to be coming in quietly,” James muttered.

McCarter slid behind the wheel and started the engine. Hawkins and Manning squeezed into the front with the Briton, while Encizo and James clambered into the truck bed. Encizo’s and James’s darker coloring would be less conspicuous in the Lebanese countryside than the other members of the team, who looked distinctly European.

Manning’s estimate of a minute to reach minimum safe distance was spot-on. Utilizing distract mechanisms already in the trailers, as well as some “Eight-balls”—one-eighth of a stick of C-4 plastic explosives—Manning had wired the drone operations centers well. The trailers ripped violently apart, but there was little flash. Electronics and corpses were ground to bits by the detonations.

While Manning had done his demolitions work, McCarter took fingerprints from the dead, utilizing a fingerprint scanner. Now, as he drove, Hawkins plugged the scanner into the sat-phone-linked laptop and uploaded information to Stony Man Farm.

“Barb, see if these are current Syrian operatives,” McCarter had text-messaged along with the data file.

Hawkins looked up from the laptop. “Bear says that it’ll take a few hours for them to check the records for certain.”

“To narrow it down, tell them the unit we saw on the sentries. They might have been veterans of the same group,” McCarter suggested.

Hawkins typed that message back to the Farm’s Computer Room. It took only a few moments to get a reply.

“Bear says thanks. He’ll see what he can get on the sentries,” Hawkins said.

“How’s our schedule, Gary?” McCarter asked.

“At this rate, we should be five minutes early to our meet with the Egyptians,” Manning answered.

“Of course, that doesn’t take into account running into local factions.”

“Just a little more drama for the evening in that case,” McCarter said. “We won’t stay and fight.”

Manning was about to say something when McCarter sailed the pickup three feet into the air after plowing through a rut in the road. The truck plopped down and shook Phoenix Force around.

“Not that we’ll be running into anyone with antiaircraft weapons.”

McCarter grinned. It was a long-standing joke between the two that the British pilot drove as if he expected vehicles could fly. Manning had grown used to his driving, but he still held on to his seat with white-knuckled strength. From the bed, Encizo and James grumbled and complained through the cab’s rear window.

“Hey, David, we don’t have seat belts back here!” James growled.

McCarter kept up the breakneck pace. Drivers weren’t known for cautious pace in the Lebanese countryside, and the Briton was following suit. “When in Rome” was a savvy strategy for blending in. It wasn’t as if there were highway patrolmen on these dirt roads. No headlights were visible on the horizon in any direction. Manning scanned out the windows for operating lights on any aircraft, but the sky was merely sprinkled with immobile stars.

“Anything back there?” McCarter asked.

“Just two rattled people,” Encizo complained. “No lights on the horizon.”

“Give a shout if you see something,” McCarter said.

“Who the hell’s gonna catch up to us?” James asked.

“You know our luck,” Manning quipped.

Hawkins shook his head. “Probably a rocket-assisted APC.”

“Don’t tempt fate,” Manning cautioned.

Something sparked in the distance, a star of light on the ground. It wasn’t a single headlight, and moments later, the snap-crack of bullets lashing past the truck filled the air. Machine-gun rounds hurtled by so quickly, Phoenix Force could hear the breaking of the sound barrier.

McCarter killed the headlights and swerved hard, breaking off their previous course. The Toyota pickup jerked and jostled as it rolled over rough ground and clumps of vegetation. Encizo and James were silent in the back, holding on for dear life so they wouldn’t be ejected when the truck hit the next bump.

The star of gunfire turned into a sidelong flare, tracer rounds scratching streaks of red in the black night. Whoever the gunner was, he was searching for Phoenix Force’s pickup. The teardrop-shaped muzzle-flash fattened and turned into a circle, bullets raking the ground around the pickup. McCarter hit the brakes and drove toward the machine gun. The arc of fire swung past and sliced into the night. Bullets had drilled into the pickup’s bodywork, and the windshield sported three new white spiderwebs where bullets ricocheted off.

The weapon was a light machine gun, the rifle rounds at the extreme limit of their normal range, lacking the power to smash the safety glass.

“Everyone okay?” McCarter asked, skidding the pickup to a halt.

“Yeah,” James said, crawling out of the bed.

Manning and Hawkins piled out of the cab, the Canadian went prone behind a bush and locked his sniper rifle’s scope on the distant gunner.

“What is it?” Hawkins asked, sliding beside him.

“An armored personnel carrier,” Manning grumbled. “Not the one you ordered, though. Just the good old-fashioned roll-along. No rocket boosters.”

Hawkins grimaced. “Some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats you.”

“Too much information there, T.J.,” James joked. “Whatever happened to ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’?”

Hawkins winced, remembering Aaron Kurtzman’s nickname.

McCarter threw the American members of Phoenix Force a harsh glare, then leaned to Manning.

“Is it alone?”

The big Canadian swept the terrain around the APC. “It’s an old Soviet-style APC, so it could either be Syrian or Syrian allied. The ground is uneven around it, and I can’t see anything else. Range out is 750 meters, give or take.”

“I said we wouldn’t stand and fight, but driving in the dark without headlights is starkers, even by my standards,” McCarter said. He consulted his map, illuminating it with his refilter flashlight. The low frequency of light put out by the ruby-colored lens wouldn’t travel far to betray their position, especially at that range. He did a quick bit of reckoning. “We can leave the pickup and continue on foot.”

“Double time,” Hawkins said, looking over McCarter’s shoulder.

“Get on the link to the Farm and tell Aaron that we ran into some interference,” McCarter ordered.

“Shit, “Hawkins muttered. “David…”

McCarter looked at the laptop screen and clucked his tongue. “The paratroopers were dishonorably discharged. Syrians were dealing drugs to their fellow soldiers. They were assigned to operations here in Lebanon. And we’ve dealt with enough heroin coming out of the Bekaa Valley to know who they could have hooked up with.”

“Drug dealers attacking Israel?” James asked.

“Muslim drug dealers,” Encizo corrected. “The Jihad has used narcotics money to supply terrorist groups with almost bottomless funding.”